Alison Dunhill


Alison Dunhill is an English artist and art historian, and also a published poet.

Biography

Born in London, Dunhill trained in Fine Art at the University of Reading under Sir Terry Frost and Rita Donagh. In the early 1970s she had a studio in Florence where she associated with some of the key figures in the Situationist International, including philosopher and filmmaker Guy Debord, the writer Gianfranco Sanguinetti and, later, the novelist and critic Michèle Bernstein.

Artistic career

Dunhill was primarily a landscape painter in her early career, and then explored more abstract forms, including mixed media artworks inspired by the surrealist ideas of chance and the found object.
For much of her artistic career Dunhill maintained studios in London but she now lives and works in King's Lynn, Norfolk where she has a studio in the 15th century Hanseatic warehouse known as . In 2015 she was awarded a residency at Despina, a contemporary art institute in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She has exhibited frequently, most recently in London in February 2019 with a solo exhibition of new and recent work; and in July 2019 she presented new works and installations with CUSP Artists at the Undercroft Gallery in Norwich.
One of her drawings selected from the Women Artists Slide Library was reproduced in The Women Artists Diary 1989.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

As an art historian, Dunhill completed an M.Phil thesis at the University of Essex on the modernist American photographer Francesca Woodman. This thesis provides a detailed analysis of the six photographic books that Woodman compiled in her lifetime, and examines them in the context of surrealism which, Dunhill argues, was a significant influence on Woodman. Her study of Woodman's book Some Disordered Interior Geometries was published in re•bus in 2008. Dunhill has presented papers on Woodman at academic conferences and gallery talks at the Douglas Hyde Gallery at Trinity College, Dublin and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts.
She contributed a memoir to a 2010 Paris exhibition catalogue of the artist and psychogeographer, and sometime Situationist, Ralph Rumney, whom she had befriended in the latter years of his life; and her published reviews include an assessment of Claudia Herstatt's Women Gallerists for Tate Etc.

Poetry

Dunhill's early poetry collection, Gig Soup Scoop, published in 1972 by a small alternative press, is now a rarity.
She was an Arvon Foundation mentee in 1991, leading to publication in Joe Soap's Canoe.
Two of her prose poems were recently long-listed for the Fish Publishing Flash Fiction Prize 2020.
Her latest publication is in the international online surrealist poetry SurVision Magazine.