Dear Materiality of the Audience,

What is the relationship with the artist’s body through a dysmorphic archive?

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 body as object and subject. It was highly personal in that it was about how I remade my body and how I was experiencing my transformed body.

The 2025 film reframes this and is loaded, with the image frame intentionally becoming smaller to reflect a sense of reclaiming, perceptions of transformation and the artist’s internal view whilst 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.

Kind Regards

A dysmorphic unfolding.

On Manifolding Bodies and Sculpting the Abject

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 to society’s handlings 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, that makes her body fold (Deleuze, 2014), in this interview, we conceptualize her body/art-matters as actively moving from manufactured to manifolding bodies.