Alison Unsworth

Alison Unsworth is a visual artist, working across a wide range of media, from sculpture and installation, to collage, photography and digital imagery. Her recent pieces of work have each focused on a specific built environment and considered how it is constructed, the particular landscaping and building materials used, and the styles and themes employed in its design.

This has resulted in a series of site-responsive works which have been both temporary in nature and remained remote from the site, for example, in the form of a leaflet or website.

During her residency at Art Gene, Alison intended to experiment with her process of producing work. Rather than taking one site as a starting point, her research focused on generic and ‘placeless’ elements of the urban landscape. She is particularly interested in conventions which are employed in towns and cities across the country, for example, the widespread use of black and gold as a colour scheme for items of street furniture such as bins and bollards. She also has an interest in the use of coordinated design schemes in areas of new development and regeneration, which are often used to represent a ‘type’ of area in a town, for example, a heritage or coastal area.

 

Image above: Alison Unsworth: work in progress at Art Gene

 

Alison used Art Gene’s research residency space to display photographs, documentation, commercial samples and found objects, which look at different patterns, palettes of colours and materials, and items of street furniture which are frequently found in public space. She planned to work with this material, to rearrange and represent it, in order to create distorted or imaginary landscapes. She experimented with the use of small-scale models and using the opportunity presented by a large studio space to incorporate ‘real’ building and landscaping materials into her work.

Alison Unsworth is based in Newcastle upon Tyne. Previous projects include commissions for temporary work in South Yorkshire and North Shields; a solo exhibition at the Queen of Hungary, Norwich; a series of leaflets exhibited as part of 54 Degrees North Festival of Contemporary Art, Hull and an installation in Newcastle Central Station as part of Capital, a Vane exhibition. She studied Fine Art at Falmouth Collage of Arts and Northumbria University.

 

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Alison Unsworth

Image below: Gold Standard 01, by Alison Unsworth