Alison Dunhill

Alison Dunhill (born 1950) is an English artist and art historian, and also a published poet.
Biography.
Born in London, Dunhill trained in Fine Art at the University of Reading under Sir Terry Frost and Rita Donagh. In the early 1970s she had a studio in Florence where she associated with some of the key figures in the Situationist International, including philosopher and filmmaker Guy Debord, the writer Gianfranco Sanguinetti and, later, the novelist and critic Michèle Bernstein.
Artistic career.
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.
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. 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. In July 2019 she presented new works and site-specific installations with CUSP Artists at the Undercroft Gallery in Norwich.
One of her drawings selected from the Women Artists Slide Library (WASL) was reproduced in The Women Artists Diary 1989.
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.
Alison Dunhill's account of the effect on her art practice of the Covid-19 lockdown is published in "Now This: Reflections on Our Arts and Cultures".
Selected solo exhibitions.
"(Selected from exhibition list on artist's website)"
Art historian.
As an art historian, Dunhill completed an M.Phil thesis at the University of Essex on the modernist American photographer Francesca Woodman. 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. Her study of Woodman's book "Some Disordered Interior Geometries" was published in "re•bus" in 2008. 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.
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; and her published reviews include an assessment of Claudia Herstatt's "Women Gallerists" for Tate Etc. She also reviewed Anna Anderson's "Childhood Rituals" exhibition at the Freud Museum in Hampstead in 2011 for Cassone: The International Online Magazine of Art and Art Books.
Poetry.
Dunhill's early poetry collection, "Gig Soup Scoop", published in 1972 by a small alternative press, is now a rarity. She was an Arvon Foundation mentee in 1991, leading to publication in "Joe Soap's Canoe". Two of her prose poems were recently long-listed for the Fish Publishing Flash Fiction Prize 2020.
Two of her poems were published in Issue 7 of the international online surrealist poetry "SurVision Magazine" in summer 2020. 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 2021. Two further poems of hers are included in the Autumn 2020 issue of the "Fenland Poetry Journal"; the cover art of this issue reproduces one of Dunhill's artworks.