After twenty years working in the advertising and commercial media industries, Alison Smith graduated from the Newcastle Art School (TAFE) in 2010 with a major in printmaking and was Highly Commended in the Port Jackson Press Graduate Printmaking Award. She has been actively involved in artist run spaces in Newcastle, as co-director of Podspace and co-curator of the Shopfront Window Gallery, and worked at the University Gallery, the University of Newcastle. Alison was Co- Founder of Pumphouse School of Design in Wickham, and is currently back in the world of advertising as Studio Manager at Out Of The Square.
Alison's art practice includes printmaking, photomedia and works on paper. A suite of her photomedia works (Turning Over) are held in the art collection of The Parliament House of Australia, Canberra.
I have always been inspired by architectural photography and have enjoyed photographing buildings. Then, nearly ten years ago, I became quite obsessed with photographing building construction sites. The lineal aesthetics of scaffolding holding particular appeal. I was also attracted to the baize that is draped over the skeletal scaffolds, shrouding the construction process, like a veil or cloak that both hides the form and promises revelation.
I started to pull my images apart, deep etching individual elements and then reassembling them into new compositions. I thought of this process as being akin to drawing.
Over time I explored these abstracted shapes and lines through a variety of mediums, including screen printing and woodcut printmaking. I like the reductive process of woodcuts—the physicality of carving—and the textural surface quality that comes from the grain of the wood and the dense layering of ink. The reductive process seems a natural fit with my interest in the erasure of detail as I pare down the information present in my work. I’m attracted to the ephemeral nature of scaffolding; that something so sturdily constructed from metal, at times so immense in size, is so temporary. Just as old buildings are bulldozed to make way for new edifices of glass, steel and concrete, so too will these monoliths one day demise. Often, scaffolding has a patina of rust—a brand new building already in decay.
My work ranges from imagery inspired by urban architecture through to pure abstraction, often exploring the reinvention of landscape.
Alison's art practice includes printmaking, photomedia and works on paper. A suite of her photomedia works (Turning Over) are held in the art collection of The Parliament House of Australia, Canberra.
I have always been inspired by architectural photography and have enjoyed photographing buildings. Then, nearly ten years ago, I became quite obsessed with photographing building construction sites. The lineal aesthetics of scaffolding holding particular appeal. I was also attracted to the baize that is draped over the skeletal scaffolds, shrouding the construction process, like a veil or cloak that both hides the form and promises revelation.
I started to pull my images apart, deep etching individual elements and then reassembling them into new compositions. I thought of this process as being akin to drawing.
Over time I explored these abstracted shapes and lines through a variety of mediums, including screen printing and woodcut printmaking. I like the reductive process of woodcuts—the physicality of carving—and the textural surface quality that comes from the grain of the wood and the dense layering of ink. The reductive process seems a natural fit with my interest in the erasure of detail as I pare down the information present in my work. I’m attracted to the ephemeral nature of scaffolding; that something so sturdily constructed from metal, at times so immense in size, is so temporary. Just as old buildings are bulldozed to make way for new edifices of glass, steel and concrete, so too will these monoliths one day demise. Often, scaffolding has a patina of rust—a brand new building already in decay.
My work ranges from imagery inspired by urban architecture through to pure abstraction, often exploring the reinvention of landscape.