What is the relationship with the artist’s body through a dysmorphic archive? A Dysmorphic Unfolding?
Made between 2021 and 2023 and shown at the Candid Art Trust in 2022, this film was originally part of "Becoming a Manufactured Sculpture," created to highlight the relationship between mind and body, gesture and appearance (body language), and the body as both object and subject. It was highly personal in that it was about how I transformed my body and my experience of it.
The 2025 film reframes this, being loaded with the image frame intentionally becoming smaller to reflect a sense of reclaiming, perceptions of transformation, and the artist’s internal view, while disrupting the permission to gaze.
Filmed on an iPhone to subvert the polished, fake and edited views of our bodies and reflects the domesticity attributed to the female form/work of the body/ alongside this being filmed in my bathroom.
Within the field of critical post-human studies, it can be argued that the iPhone is an extension of the body, as we increasingly use it as an assistant or extension of our bodies.
On Manifolding Bodies and Sculpting the Abject Publication 2025.
https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/matter/article/view/50504
Copyright (c) 2025 Swantje Martach, Lea-Alina Schwarz, Alison Dollery
Abstract
Having become from norm-complying flight attendant to bariatric patient and laparoscopic posthuman to the exclusive canvas of the artist who lives as it, the body matter of London-based Alison Dollery is a “plane of immanence” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2000). It is considered insightful here in that it enables us to realise the excesses in which bodies exist in society’s handling of them. Dollery gets in touch with her body matter directly, by touching it and letting acrylic and oil paint touch it. Grabbing without gripping, she initiates deformings, queering such dualisms as body and mind, matter and method, being and becoming, touching and being touched, the artist and the object. As we consider Dollery’s hands (lat. manus) as possessing a vitalist force of zoe (Braidotti, 2008) in her oeuvre, which makes her body fold (Deleuze, 2014), in this interview, we conceptualise her body/art-matters as actively moving from manufactured to manifolding bodies.
