PAUL GATES
Alison's work combine swathes of colour mixed with intricate, vivid detail to form worlds apart. Alien landscapes that I feel reflect the increasing strangeness we see in the world about us.
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It is said that we form or create the world we see. If this is true for us as individuals, then it also true for us as a species, as mankind's eyes and ears become bigger and faster. What we see with our own eyes has perhaps become less and less familiar, and along with it what we are forming from what we see collides with what we have known about ourselves to date. The world is not so familiar to us as it was! It is our home, but it is a home with far more furniture under the carpet and behind the radiator than we ever thought possible.
We find ourselves in a world expanding faster than most of us can keep track of with no signs of a comforting edge or limit in sight. We stand within a large expanding strangeness.
Alison's images, for me, reflect this feeling of being lost within the newly discovered. With no precedents to guide our reactions or give values to what we are shown, we either edit for comfort or are shocked and perhaps slightly lost. New territory is also an opportunity for us, though . . . an opportunity not only to make new maps but also to find new ways to make new maps.
A lot of what we have newly seen does not lend itself to being described in terms of the things that can be looked at directly. Perhaps to draw some maps we have to look out of the corner of our eye, drawing on what we can very nearly see but cannot resolve into quantity, size, or texture, in order to describe. It is possible, however, that some of these new maps will turn out, after all, to be more intimate and familiar than we would ever have guessed.
Paul Gates may be reached at gat09@dial.pipex.com.
If you are interested in exhibiting or
purchasing Alison's work,
please E-mail her at alison@raimes.com.
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