Alison Hand

Alison Hand
Artist, Writer & Business Development Manager – Architype Architects, London

Alison Hand was born in North Yorkshire. Alison holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art and is a published writer on art and architecture. She has exhibited in Germany, Hong Kong, London, and across the UK. Her work has won numerous awards including the Basil H Alkazzi Scholarship; the Gordon Luton Award for Fine Art; and the Stephenson Harwood Award.

Alison is also a committed member of Art Gene’s Board of Trustees who has made a significant contribution to our research, particularly in relation to the development and writings around Art Gene’s Revisioning Utopia Charrette.

Image above: And the Cities Will Shine, by Alison hand

 

My interests are the representation of landscape; perceptions of uselessness and utility; regeneration, utopianism, and the picturesque. Landscape is where we inscribe power, ownership, and decide what is worth looking at. I like these new, peripheral kinds of landscape that are thrown up through regeneration, reclamation, and ‘improvement’. Strange peninsulas of new building sites, eco parks, rubbish dumps, service cities, holiday homes, olympic sites and expos, cleared land waiting for something. I am interested in how a landscape is perceived as useful or useless, and how we negotiate it. When does a walk become a trespass.

“Alison Hand’s work is concerned with the representation and identity of place, and the power relations articulated through particular visions of landscape. Her paintings – situated somewhere between landscape and abstraction – slide between slicks of gloss and spray, baroque detail and collage, interweaving a building site topography with the structures and follies of classical landscape painting.

Through each painting, Hand prises a gap between promise and reality – spaces in flux, invested with utopianist idealism, but somewhere characterized by displacement and fantasy. By repositioning the landscape as a site of transition and deconstruction, she deterritorialises the ‘picturesque’ and refocuses the act of painting as record, fiction, memory, and exaggeration.”

Beers Lambert Contemporary Art

 

Image below, Kindergarten, by Alison hand