Alice Dawson

About

Our understanding of what it means to be human is shifting. My work sits in the ‘posthuman convergence’ and explores the rise of the ‘other’ in posthuman feminist terms. Through this lens I challenge the culturally accepted abuse of human and nonhuman bodies, confronting the food and meat industry and the loss of biodiversity due to globalisation and industrial agriculture. I investigate life cycles and chains of consumption in the physical and spiritual sense. The Earth is as mentally and physically sick as the human, whereby the causes of both the environmental crisis and mental illness are the same, as are the solutions.

Culminating in apocalyptic, gruesome, and comic sculpture, text, film, and installation, I create artefacts of an imagined future. The speculative fictional worlds I build are polysemous, directly speaking to the life of the object or creature whilst presenting a metaphor for manmade systems and the othered human experience. Through 3D scanning and casting wasted animal parts, I monumentalise and make permanent animals who are undervalued or bred for consumption.

I approach art-making with surrender and spontaneity, the work makes itself and I am a vessel. Working with detritus of a consumerist culture I am interested in the ancestral histories of objects and organic matter. I work with surrealist psychic automatism and the work is guided by the object or animal I find. What I read, experience and see lives in my subconscious and comes out in the making, whereby its theoretical framework is entirely spontaneous and guided by the divine.