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Alison Shanks Biography
I create Porcelain sculptures which are predominantly figure-heads of our times - collages taken from images from the mass media – a kind of masque media – a carnival of people.
My earlier work in the film and music industry has left me with a fascination of popular culture. I am particularly interested in the ‘uncanny’, the ‘grotesque’ and our consumption of ‘beauty culture’.
After graduating my Fine Art degree in 1984 in London I lived and worked as an artist in Spain. I spent the next seven years in the film and television industry in London before moving to the Colorado in the USA where I built a house, married and had two children. Returning to the UK in 1995 I made greenwood art and furniture which grew into landscape design and architecture. Whilst doing this I started to make ceramic mosaics for commission and this led me to undertake a degree in Ceramics at Bath Spa University, which succeeded in inspiring in me a love of the material and the creation of art. This has led me to completing an MA which has allowed me to expand and explore my ideas, concepts and use of materials.
My larger than life-size figureheads play with an ‘unsymmetrical butterfly effect’ to create an illusionary judder, amplifying the feeling of Uncanniness.
This November I plan to initiate a radical change in how I work. I will become a nomadic artist on a sailing boat embarking on a self-sufficient circumnavigation in order to undertake artist’s residences to further my practice and to spread knowledge and techniques through teaching assignments.
There are three major aspects to my new lifestyle which I hope to investigate and which will become pivotal in my work:
I am an "existential migration nomad" undertaking phenomenological research (Madison, 2006) as I have chosen to leave my country of origin in order to live transitorily as a foreigner in new lands. This challenges usual definitions of being at home, the experience of foreignness, what constitutes belonging, and the nature of homelessness. I am travelling by sailing boat rather than a quicker mode of transport to enable an intimate connection with my surroundings, both during travel and on arrival.
Although scheduled around what will be a number of medium to long term residencies (currently Brazil, Australia, Spain), there will be a significant element of randomness to my encounters which will give a genuine openness to the contingencies of place. The nomadic traveller is seen as occupying a position on the fringes of organised society, where they temporarily enact a different form of sociability: one that is spontaneous, elicits participation and releases the individual from the more rigid forms of social interaction. This I believe will contribute significantly to my work.
Many people would argue that today's world is best captured not in one place or another but in the traffic between them and the ‘butterfly effect’ of the resulting human interactions. The art world, having evolved into a global industry, is of course implicated in that traffic.
Edward Lorenz’s chaos theory derives the name of the “butterfly effect” from the theoretical example of a hurricane's formation in the Atlantic being contingent on a butterfly in the Brazilian rainforest flapping its wings several weeks earlier. My ambition is to create this effect by leaving behind knowledge, contacts, techniques, ideas, sculptures and concepts at each residency, and taking with me all these attributes to future residencies or ports of call. The accent is on authenticity, chance encounters and the exchange of knowledge.