ARTIST STATEMENT

Alana’s work often incorporates materials linked to domesticity, as she makes use of everyday items such as satin lining, yarn and even sugar. Alana’s work attempts to make sense of the world she inhabits. Dismayed by such platitudes as “that is how it has always been,” her questioning takes the form of performance, sculpture and installation. Repetition and mark making are key aesthetic elements in her work. The build up of a simple mark, movement or idea can create a complex work that calls for reassessment. Alana’s questioning does not provide answers but she is striving to elicit reactions in the viewer, maybe to comfort but also to evoke laughter or even unnerve.  

BIOGRAPHY

Alana Tyson was born in Calgary, Canada. She graduated from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 2006, with a BFA (Hons) degree in Painting. She moved to the UK in 2007 and currently lives in North Wales.

Exhibitions include Fiberart International 2007, which toured the Eastern United States; Oriel Davies Open, Oriel Davies, Newtown, UK; Scythia 10 International Textiles Biennale, Kherson Ukraine; Crafting Anatomies: Materials, Performance, Identity, Bonington Gallery, Nottingham; Decision Time, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee. She was the recipient of the Ignac and Karla Herskovic Memorial Scholarship (2006), and has received support from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts (2006), The Arts Council of Wales (2013, 2014) and a-n Magazine (2013). In 2015 she is focusing on residencies at Ruthin Craft Centre in Wales and at The University for the Creative Arts in England. She is also involved in a project Power in the Land, responding to the decommissioning of the last nuclear reactor in Wales.