Alison Philp
Alison Philp is a Scottish artist whose practice moves between painting, drawing, and writing. At the centre of her practice is a belief that the act of making is itself a form of knowledge and that sustained attention to the natural world, pursued through mark-making over time, produces something that cannot be arrived at any other way.
Often beginning from close observation of gardens or forest edges, her drawings evolve as traces of time spent looking, thinking, and reworking; records of a prolonged encounter. Watercolour is used both spontaneously and accumulatively, building soft, transparent layers that hold a history of making.
Painting is a slow conversation with material in which ambiguity and imperfection become essential. Writing is also integral to her practice, sharing the quality of attention, slow, repeated, sitting with uncertainty until something true emerges.
Lived Experience
I live and work in North Fife, Scotland, where the garden and the surrounding landscape are central to my practice. I work directly from observation, outside when the weather allows, and my subjects are most often the plants and edges of the natural world close to where I live.
I came to my current practice through a long engagement with both visual art and writing; the two have always been inseparable for me. I completed my MFA at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in 2018 and have continued to develop a practice that moves slowly and deliberately, built around sustained looking and the belief that attention itself is a form of care.
I am also a voluntary exhibition coordinator for the Art and Nature Collective, a Dundee-based CIC, which keeps me connected to a community of artists working at the intersection of art and the natural world.
