From the film My Punk is not Dead, 2022
It’s a very strange thing to meet someone with whom you have an immediate connection, a sense of a shared understanding of why you do the things you do. This happened to me with Alison. Very late in the making of the exhibition Women in Revolt! she messaged me letting me know that she had ‘information from the mid 1970’s onwards which I think might be useful for you’. There was no mention of her own work, just a gesture of support and care for someone else. A few weeks later we met at Tate Britain. She, at my request, brought photographs related to work made at Romilly Crescent in the late 1970’s and another series in support of the miners’ strikes from 1984.
Amid my frantic excitement at the works and a rather ad hoc curation - polaroids balanced on notebooks and surrounded by coffee cups - we talked about power, sex, community and friendship. Although deep into 1970’s and 1980’s research, perhaps what resonated most for me were the tantalising mentions of her most recent photographic and performance work centred on walking, and women’s relationship to landscape. She spoke about contouring, of avoiding the patriarchal and dominant desire to get from A to B as quickly as possible or to cut a harsh line through a landscape but meander, to observe. As she has described, “My work involves walking alone, for considerable distances, keeping off the paths, striding and ‘contouring’ through moorland and mountainous areas. Through a passage of movement incorporating walking and dancing I have documented elements of my life since the 1970’s.”
I later came to learn that Alison and I shared a passion for the Scottish writer and poet Nan Shepherd who in her 1977 book The Living Mountain describes time spent in the Cairngorms, her preference for walking alone, her sheer joy at the endless surprises and challenges of the land. In Shepherd there is always patience, exhilaration and a deep respect for the natural world, an understanding that she is only one more element of the landscape. In looking at Alison’s walking works we see a physical manifestation of Shepherd's instructions for the mountain, "The senses must be trained and disciplined, the eye to look, the ear to listen, the body must be trained to move with the right harmonies.” There is rigour but there is always gentleness and care.
Linsey Young, London, October 15, 2024
Selected Exhibitions:
My Punk is Not Dead, TG, Nottingham, 2022
Runner Beans (1983), One Thoresby Street, Nottingham, 2019
Southend (1982), Salon de Normandy, Paris, 2019
Act 1 – 1 Act, Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art & Winch Gallery, Southend, 2016
Grains, TG, Nottingham, 2014
Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970–1990, Tate Britain, National Galleries of Scotland and the Whitworth, The University of Manchester (touring) 2023 to 2025
Light Years Ahead, John Marchant Gallery, Brighton; Leicester de Montfort University Gallery, 2023
Punk: Rage + Revolution, Backlit, Nottingham, 2023
Axisweb Street Player, Wakefield, 2019