Our Featured Artist this month, Alison Dollery is an interdisciplinary artist whose work navigates the complex terrain of the body, identity, and transformation. With a practice rooted in sculpture, performance, and conceptual inquiry, she challenges conventional perceptions of form and gender through her ongoing project, The Manufactured Body. Based in the UK, Dollery’s work is both deeply personal and politically resonant, blurring boundaries between art and activism, the physical and the imagined. Her pieces aren’t just seen, they’re felt.
BIO -
Alison Dollery is a British interdisciplinary visual artist and curator.
Alison holds a BA (hons) in Fine Art, an MFA in Arts and Humanities from the Royal College of Art (Grad 25).
She has exhibited internationally, performed at the Tate Modern and given artist talks at the Royal Academy of Arts.
Alison Dollery, with her Matrescence Series 2024 at The Motherhood Exhibition 2025 Upper Gulbenkian Gallery, Kensington. London.
www.alisondollery.com @alisondolleryartist
1 - Could you explain your practice?
Thank you for honouring me as your artist of the month; it means a lot.
My artwork and practice use my body, 'the artist's body,' as the material, medium, and canvas, allowing me to explore and express my bodily experiences and transformation profoundly.
I use the power of art to improve mine and other people’s relationships with our transforming bodies. I want my work to collapse the space between artist and life model, life/body experiences, and representations of the body. I see my work and body as research.
Alongside transforming my body with art materials, I am passionate about using drawing and writing to think through my body, but I still need more confidence in these areas. I use all of this to document my experiences of the body in the art world and within a genre that expands performance and body art. As part of my practice I visit artists making work about the body and write about it.
My work started as a cathartic process to think through how my body was drastically changing through significant medical transformation. My body has been every dress size, from 8 to 26. It has allowed me to deeply examine our relationships and perceptions we have with our bodies.
Seeing how others react and relate to my journey has been highly inspiring as part of my practice and extended curatorial work. Because I have represented my body in so many different sizes, the audience experiences their bodies through mine; they are shocked to see morbid obesity, anorexia, fuller figure, loose skin, lumps, bumps, and clothes not fitting correctly. These are all things everybody experiences yet are entangled in extreme negativity and shame. The audience read my story, see my artwork and witness my struggles, allowing for a deep, relatable experience with the artwork. They see their own wrinkles, cellulite and surgical scars through my work, its extremely honest.
I try not to portray the body in a specific way, i.e., beautify it or make it abject. I shoot it as I see and feel it in that moment. I want it to be real and show our bodies amazing ability to transform.
2 - Is art relevant today?
There is nothing more important than art and creativity, especially today with the complexities of our ever-changing world.
Arts can transform our health, our experiences, and our relationships with each other. I love art so much that I would not have coped with life without it. It's the main driving force of my life, alongside my family.
Art has brought understanding and knowledge to my life, helped me deal with complex health issues and lead to a deeper acceptance of my body and life.
I additionally consult and curate in my local town, which was highlighted for arts and culture development. I feel very honoured to be a part of this. Last year, I curated and provided opportunities for over 150 artists, some of whom have gone on to win major arts awards.
3 – We are always asked what other artists influence us; we want to know what art you don’t like and which influences you?
I love Tracey Emin, Jenny Saville, Vivienne Westwood, Paula Rego, Carolee Schneeman, CASSILS and Jo Spence. I love authenticity and artists that relate their own experiences through their work and their bodies.
I also feel strongly about arts education and paying homage to the artists before us. Especially women artists or artists that have had their voices silenced. The feminist performance artists of the 1960’s onwards has been a huge area of research for me.
I additionally consult and curate in my local town, which was highlighted for arts and culture funding and development. I feel very honoured to be a part of this. Last year, I curated and provided opportunities for over 150 artists, some of whom have gone on to win major arts awards. Artist’s ecologies are important. I keep thinking to forget your Ego and create an Eco of artists opportunities, we are all artists, and we are in this together.
4- If you could go back 10-20 years, what would you tell your younger self?
You have used the power of art to improve your relationship with your body and to help others too, alongside studying art, demonstrating the philosophical and socio-political knowledge entangled in this subject. Keep going. Embrace all failure as an opportunity for curiosity. Process, practice and trust yourself.
To myself ten years ago and ten years in the future, I have learnt to get up, turn up, and trust that what is meant for you in life will find you.
5 – If you could go forward 10-20 years, what do you hope to have done or not done?
I would love to be recognised in the art world for my work. I hope my work will always be understood within the time and context of why it was made. I want the work to change how we experience our bodies and question what our future bodies have the potential to become.
