Alyson Minkley
Alyson Minkley
Cast ceramic with clear acrylic display furniture
Cast ceramic with clear acrylic display furniture
Cast ceramic with clear acrylic display furniture
Cast ceramic with clear acrylic display furniture
Trained in sculpture at Kingston, graduated 1990, my early career was in environment & community arts. Disenfranchised by neo-liberal expectations for growth and improvement through the arts as cultural-substitution for social-services, I made a career-shift into education, spending fifteen years challenging diminishing creativity and critical-thinking in the secondary curriculum. Recently returned to practice: selected opens RWA, FAB, 44AD, & solo, The-Art-Cohort. Active member of SpacePlacePractice & Creative Corporeality research groups. Commissions include award-winning RiV & residencies in Wiltshire & Cornwall. Shortlisted Visions of Science ArtPrize, winner Porthleven Prize & Bath SPARKS.
Website: www.alysonminkley.co.uk
Instagram: @alysonminkley
Artist Statement
Despite sculptural training, my practice is not material-led; ideologically it questions materiality in over-consumption, anti-consumerism and ecocide. I use materials to embody labour and convey meaning in contextual association. Investment in process develops dialogue, shaping outcomes in a respectful dance between material and maker. Tension plays between traditional solid-state materials and transient contemporary digital media. I mould thought and feeling as malleable material. Exploring experimental balance between intuition/response and research/skill, embodying ideas to evoke phenomenological reflection & enquiry.
Themes include paradox of didactic systems in an age-of-information, political and social manipulation through media and education, challenging social-constructs of age, gender and neuro-normality, and cataloguing embodied social anthropology. As antithesis to working in secondary education and with an inescapable lens of dyspraxia, I advocate curiosity, play and interaction, testing ideas, questioning boundaries and connecting cross-discipline; this is evident both as outcome and process. I collaborate with experts in wider-fields, e.g. ‘Human Murmuration’ involved consultation in behavioural psychology, musical composition and collaboration with a creative coder.
Art as a vehicle to engender dialogue is recurrent throughout my projects. Ideas sparked through chance encounters and developed in consultation and debate. Labour-intensive making processes create opportunity for reflection through conversation and, when participation is involved, conversations can become material for making, embodied or in spoken word/text form. ‘Haptic Traces’ performance drawing series uses written text - snippets of dialogue, news broadcasts and reflective thought post-lockdown to physically surround and contain me. Folklore, industrial history and personal tales of local people, gathered in-residence, are embodied in precariously-balanced sculptures created for the Porthleven Prize in response to Cornish post-referendum social-politics.
In short, my practice is socially-engaged, experiential and contemporarily topical, while my approach is cross-discipline with dialogue and embodiment as enduring methodologies.