Alyson Minkley
Bath Spa MA Fine Art graduate 2020, Minkley originally trained in Sculpture at Kingston in the late 80s. After an early career in environment & community arts, Minkley taught Art & Design in secondary & further education until her recent return to professional practice.
Her work holds tension between traditional solid-state materials & transience in contemporary digital media. Themes include paradox of didactic systems in an age-of-information, political & social manipulation through media & education, challenging social-constructs & cataloguing embodied social anthropology. As antithesis to working in secondary education & with an inescapable lens of dyspraxia, Minkley advocates curiosity, play & interaction, testing ideas, questioning boundaries & connecting cross-discipline; this is evident both as outcome & process. Art as a vehicle to engender dialogue is recurrent throughout all projects.
Socially-engaged, experiential & contemporarily topical, Minkley's works cross-discipline with dialogue & embodiment as enduring methodologies.
Works
Series 1
Works in this series use video as a medium to explore themes of postmodern flattening & fragmenting of existence in time & space – from deconstruction & reconstruction of Zoom screens to abstract mandalas formed through stop-frame reanimation of moving human-form.
Datafield re-personifies abstract data in an existential matrix investigating conflicting feelings of alienation & pre-destiny experienced in the paradoxical relationship between didactic education & overwhelm of virtual information systems.
Human Murmuration references origins of mathematical algorithms that drive our social media feeds in communication between flocking starlings. Social influencer phrases taken from bot posts are passed between performers in choral formations of call-and-response & perpetual cannons, parodying the manipulative capability of social media when used by companies like Cambridge Analytica.
Haptic Traces is part of a much bigger project investigating ways to map the body as an antithesis to the process of anatomical life-drawing & exploring social embarrassment.
Series 2
Embodiment features strongly in this series and underlying themes challenge systems of cataloguing, measurement or value and in particular self-value. I have intentionally sought to celebrate beauty, exploring tension between surface-appearance and inner-turmoil.
Body As Evidence critically reanalyses constraints of fixed clothing sizes based on an idealised ratio of female body measurements.
Hanging Out inverts perceptions with super-real life-studies on baking parchment copies of their clothes.
Strange Fruit questions the impacts of interfering with nature’s balance & the complexity of accounting for error.
Cataloguing Anxiety documents involuntary sculptures as mementos of stress found in the debris left by students.
Body Bags & Weight explore notions of excess in consumer society.
Materials are selected for contextual meaning as well as physical properties & I enjoy the technical challenges of traditional making as a meditative process; one that offers opportunity for dialogue & social engagement when casting & drawing from life.
Series 3
My practice engages with space/place, often through residencies/commissions and in my early career many works developed through local community engagement.
As a Porthleven Prizewinner in 2019 I spent nearly a month in the Cornish coastal town. The resulting hybrid sculptural forms of the All at Sea series balance teeteringly like the local politics and relationships between tourists & locals and the land & sea. Titles allude to nautical idioms and the photographic image & text artworks explore the complex influences of evangelical movements within our culture. The work was well received when it toured and returned to Porthleven in 2020 with the Sink or Swim projection installation lighting up the local lifeboat station with an SOS for climate change and nature emergency.
More recent site-specific works includes Flood Flags, commissioned for the award-winning River-is-the-Venue project and installed during Bath Festival of Nature & Forest of the Imagination events.