Alison Dunhill

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.[2][3]

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 Hanse House. In 2015 she was awarded a residency at Despina (previously known as Largo das Artes), a contemporary art institute in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.[4] She has exhibited frequently; she is a Member of the National Society of Painters, Sculptors & Printmakers; and she was a founder member of the Kingsgate Workshops Trust.[5] In July 2019 she presented new works and site-specific installations with CUSP Artists at the Undercroft Gallery in Norwich.[6]

One of her drawings selected from the Women Artists Slide Library (WASL) was reproduced in The Women Artists Diary 1989.[7]

Three of Dunhill's paintings, and a discussion of the techniques she used to create them from her own original photographs, were reproduced in Diana Constance's book on painting from photographs published in 1995.[8]

• 1984 - Kingsgate Gallery, London
• 1990 - Piers Feetham Gallery, London
• 1992 - Hampstead Theatre Gallery, London
• 1994 - Piers Feetham Gallery, London
• 1995 - Hampstead Theatre Gallery, London
• 1998 - Incomes Data Services, London
• 2003 - 'Segments', Gallery 47, London
• 2007 - Neptune Gallery, Hunstanton
• 2012 - Greyfriars Art Space, King's Lynn
• 2013 - Flow Films, London
• 2015 - Largo das Artes, Rio de Janeiro
• 2018 - Fermoy Gallery, King's Lynn
• 2019 - 'Upscape', A/side-B/side Gallery, London

(Selected from exhibition list on artist's website)[9]

As an art historian, Dunhill completed an M.Phil thesis at the University of Essex on the modernist American photographer Francesca Woodman.[10][11] 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.[12] Her study of Woodman's book Some Disordered Interior Geometries[13] was published in re•bus in 2008.[14] 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.[5]

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;[1] and her published reviews include an assessment of Claudia Herstatt's Women Gallerists for Tate Etc.[15][16] She also reviewed Anna Anderson's Childhood Rituals exhibition[17] at the Freud Museum in Hampstead in 2011 for Cassone: The International Online Magazine of Art and Art Books.[18]

Dunhill's early poetry collection, Gig Soup Scoop, published in 1972 by a small alternative press,[19] is now a rarity.[20] She was an Arvon Foundation mentee in 1991, leading to publication in Joe Soap's Canoe.[21][22] Two of her prose poems were recently long-listed for the Fish Publishing Flash Fiction Prize 2020.[23]

Two of her poems were published in Issue 7 of the international online surrealist poetry SurVision Magazine in summer 2020.[24] In September 2020 her poetry collection As Pure as Coal Dust was awarded 2nd prize in the James Tate Poetry Chapbook Contest and is scheduled for publication in early 2021.[25] Two further poems of hers are included in the Autumn 2020 issue of the Fenland Poetry Journal;[26] the cover art of this issue reproduces one of Dunhill's artworks.[27]