British artist Alison McKenna (UK, 1970), works in a variety of media including painting, film, photography and collage. Her interests encompass protest, alchemy, social utopias, spiritual evolution and sites of pilgrimage and gathering. McKenna uses photography and drawing on site, for later exploration in the studio. Research visits have been made to Crete and Delphi, Greenham Common, Glastonbury Tor, Waun Mawn in Wales, Ardmore in Ireland and Croydon Country Park Nature Reserve. The resultant works were then created and offered as acts of resistance and transcendence.

Paintings are rendered in smooth emulsion, using soft pinks, deep blues, mauves, emerald green, deep reds of the earth and vibrant yellows, combined in elegant, rhythmic passages through which the colour becomes a medicine, eliminating and simplifying leaving nothing but colour and contour. A video work entitled ‘Sun Stands Still’ 2016/2024 (19min HD video). This film choreographs a unique experience in place, movement, and sound within the mystical landscape of Glastonbury Tor in Somerset, documenting a female-only evocation to the Sun on the occasion of the Winter Solstice. The installation work ‘I Am Because You Are’ (2024) consists of around twenty five of the artist’s own photographs taken at protests, places and gatherings combined with research materials. Many of these photographic materials have interventions with paint, ink and tape.