Alison Russell: Memories - Vivid, False and Lost

Allison Russell's exhibition, Memories: Vivid, False and Lost examines the fragile, shifting and often contradictory nature of human memory – how it shapes our understanding of ourselves, how it distorts what we believe to be true, and how it sometimes abandons us entirely. Memory is never fixed; it is an unstable interplay between what is vividly recalled, what is unconsciously fabricated, and what slips quietly beyond reach. This tension lies at the core of Alison's drawing practice.

Her work emerges from the subconscious, where memories do not announce themselves as linear narratives but surface instead through instinctive gestures. She relies on automatic drawing as a process of excavation, allowing the hand to reveal traces of past experiences that the mind may only partially recognise. Each artwork becomes both an act of remembering and an acknowledgement of forgetting, an attempt to map moments that are simultaneously clear and elusive.