Alison Smith

Drawn to the inherently political potential of the human face Alison Smith uses portraiture as a vehicle to explore its complexities and ambiguities. By using her own experience as an adoptee, she investigates and challenges perceptions surrounding the diversity of human experiences of identity. Her portraits are made from drawings, from life, or from memory. For Smith her artistic process becomes a vital and generative space for exploration, giving her the ability to dismantle the forms of the face, sometimes to a point of dematerialisation almost beyond recognition. Multiple strategies of thin painterly layers build a complex work, giving the viewer space to consider how we present our own faces to the world, and the unique ways in which various cues frame complex human agencies of recognition and representation.

‘How Beauty Begins’ is a continued exploration of face via the process of Monotype, a medium which Smith finds to be a catalyst for her practice and continually returns to it. Beginning with drawings made recently at The Louvre of Ancient Greek and Roman sculptures, Smith explores how historical representations transform and degenerate through time and space. Using specific processes Smith’s works present an initial look of age and antiquity, placing them at a junction between the present and the past, and the observed and the abstract. The nature of working with Monotypes set systems and guidelines within Smith’s work. She finds that working withing these imposed rules gives her agency to explore, challenge and displace known narratives in her work. Curious by nature, Smith is always open to new explorations in her work and today her work spans across drawing, painting, printmaking and sculpture. Recently Smith has started to question her own ancestral diaspora and begun to investigate personal European histories to continue her understanding of identity, place and self.