Alison is a South African artist, born in 1989 in Port Elizabeth. She attained her B.Tech in Fine Arts at NMMU in 2012. In 2016 she moved to Johannesburg where she works as an artist and curator. Last year, she received the Ampersand Fellowship award.

Her background in curation and as a student: mixed media sculpture and installation lead to an interested in visual language, its significance in most creation mythologies and how art correspondingly parallels, deviates from and transforms pre-existing structures.

Currently, her drawings or collages are presented as sequences or pairs of narratives which are both inspired by and sourced from contemporary visual culture, historical and mythological imagery. The sequences often have experimental stylistic differences in order to investigate the potential significance of a material or colour or style used alongside a seeming narrative. The combinations of iconic imagery in sometimes dualistic scenarios (juxtaposed and due to them being out of their ordinary context etc) hope to tempt the viewer into open-ended ‘visual prose’ lead by what is correspondingly familiar and unknown.

Her work often features book pages. For her, the pages are significant because of the chemical compound causing books to smell sweet.

Art questions the truth we understand as a reflex in the written and spoken word through its materiality. When we see a material our reflex is to ponder its past, its present, possibilities, and its potentials