Alison Dollery is a Visual Artist, Writer, Researcher and Curator who employs the materiality of her own body as both the medium and canvas (Body as a Canvas) for her work, engaging in a diverse array of artistic forms, expanding practices of drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, performance/body art, and writing. 

These forms are all unified around the lived experience of her body, which she refers to as having a "Manufactured Body". Her interdisciplinary art practice and research have been deeply influenced by her long-term health conditions, stigmatisation of the body and her journey of drastic weight loss and body transformation. Using her body as a canvas and through research, she asserts ownership of her embodied experiences. 

Alison holds an MFA in Art and Humanities from the Royal College of Art and a 1st-Class BA (Hons) in Fine Art from UCA. Alison is currently studying for a PhD in Art and Design at Sunderland University, with an awarded fully funded studentship from the Northern Bridge Consortium and support from the Helen McArdle Nursing and Care Research Institute, NHS and UKCO.

Her award-winning visual art practice, writings, and research are exhibited and published internationally. 

Key moments include her 2025 artist talk at the Royal Academy of Arts, Matter Journal (May 2025), performance art at the Tate Modern and being featured as an artist with Haus a Rest, Women in Art Prize, among many others. 

Alison received full funding for her first solo show in 2023, in collaboration with Arts Development and Levelling Up government funds, for the Manufactured Body Exhibition, and again in 2024 for her co-curated arts exhibition Finding Place and The Summer Exhibition, where she exhibited over 200 artists.

"Her peers describe her as making groundbreaking work". (RA, 2025)

  Alison is believed to be the first British artist to use their body as art to show a body that has been medically transformed and manipulated through surgical interventions in contemporary society (Metabolic Bariatric Surgery). Documenting and making artworks since 2017 through practice research and written theory based upon her lived (living) experience of MBS, medicine, health and care alongside a body that has been every dress size from a size 8-26. Her work on body image is thought-provoking and changes perceptions of what a body can be and the future of our bodies.

*funding awarded by the UK government, Levelling Up/ Arts Council Priority Place.