Alyson Minkley
British/American artist Alyson Minkley lives and works in Bath UK. With a 1st class degree in sculpture from Kingston, 1990, and a distinction at MFA at Bath Spa, 2021, Alyson’s journey as an emerging artist has been in two parts, split to raise her three children.
Her socially-engaged practice has evolved from an early career in community & environment arts with commissions for Common Ground & CORAL Arts. Alyson has taught art & design in secondary/further education inspiring future generations and she is positive about neurodifference, after a late-life diagnosis made sense of the lens through which she experiences life as a dyspraxic person.
During her residency at Emerge 21-22, with a support bursary from Somerset Art Works, Alyson has developed her new work Synapse. Her Haptic Traces Series received highly-commended for Hauser & Wirth Prize at Black Swan Arts 2022 and won Bath Art Prize 2021. Long-listed for UKNA22 and shortlisted for Visions of Science 2020 for Datafield, also screened at several regional film festivals. 2019/20 Alyson was artist-in-residence at St Mary’s School, Wiltshire and winner of Porthleven Prize residency, Cornwall. Other recent works have been exhibited in a solo show at The Art Cohort, Bath, and opens at RWA Bristol & The Mall London.
Training in sculpture, my practice might be material-led, in fact, ideologically it questions materiality in over-consumption, anti-consumerism, & ecocide. When appropriate, I use materials to embody labour and convey meaning through contextual association. Investment in process develops dialogue, shaping outcomes in a respectful dance between material & maker. Working with materials, my repertoire stretches from solid-state 3D, through fluidity of textile, drawing, & text to transience in time-based film, durational performance, & immersive virtual environments. I see myself as a shaper of thought & feeling as much as material; exploring experimental balance between intuition/response & research/skill. Starting with embodiment of an idea, my aim is to evoke phenomenological reflection & inquiry.
Themes of investigation include living in paradox with didactic systems in an age of information overload, political & social manipulation through media & education, challenging social constructs of age, gender & neuro-normality and cataloguing embodied social anthropology. As antithesis to working in education and with an inescapable lens of dyspraxia, I advocate curiosity, play & interaction, testing ideas, questioning boundaries & connecting cross-discipline; this is evident in my work both as outcome & process. I collaborate with experts in wider-fields from behavioural psychologists to creative coders to understand their practices & enrich my own.
Art as a vehicle to engender dialogue is recurrent throughout my projects. Ideas sparked through chance encounters & developed in consultation and debate. Labour-intensive making-processes create opportunity for reflection through conversation and, when participation is involved, conversations can become the material for making, embodied or in spoken-word or text form. From the durationally scribed text of Haptic Traces: 17 seconds taken from snippets of dialogues, news broadcasts & private thoughts reflecting on transition post-lockdown, to folklore, industrial history & personal tales of local people, gathered while in residence, and embodied in the precariously-balanced sculptural-works created in response to the complex social-politics of post-referendum Cornwall for the Porthleven Prize. My most recent project Synapse invites participants to cocreate with me, physically stitching their thoughts & feelings into the surface of the soft sculpture slowly transforming its material presence.
In short, my practice is socially-engaged, experiential, and contemporarily topical while my approach is cross-discipline with dialogue and embodiment as enduring methodologies.
To see more of Alyson’s work follow the links below: