About

Alison Reid (b. 1974) is a Liverpool-based emerging artist working primarily in painting.

Her practice is rooted in experimentation. Painting is treated as a working method rather than a style: a way to test how colour, surface, time and material behaviour generate meaning. She is drawn to paint because it is a lived encounter — an event of perception — where meaning emerges through sustained looking and return.

The work is built through repetition and revision. Colour often begins with loose studies and drawings pinned around the studio — fragments of the body and of presence — while surfaces are developed through return, adjustment, scraping back and rebuilding. She makes and adapts tools from found objects, allowing process to dictate form and scale rather than arriving with a fixed outcome.

A question running through the practice is whether harmony might be understood as a kind of universal constant — not as polish or resolution, but as a momentary alignment that appears through sustained attention, friction, and time. She approaches this through what she calls grasping: a method of working where each attempt opens the question further rather than closing it down.

Alongside painting, her MA in Contemporary Performance has expanded her practice research and opened the work further to exchange with other disciplines. Recent projects place painting under changing conditions — including experiments with sound and controlled light — to sharpen the enquiry and keep the work in motion.

CV

Education

2025-present | MA Contemporary Performance, Liverpool Hope University, UK

2022-2025 | B.A. Fine Art (First Class Honours), Liverpool Hope University, UK

Group Exhibitions

2026 | TWENTY, INNSiDE by Melia, Liverpool, UK

2025 | New Courtyard Gallery Launch, Hope Park, Liverpool Hope University, UK

2025 | Food for Gaza Fundraising for Thamra, Indie Biennial, Ghost Art School, The Bakery, Liverpool, UK

2025 | Traces, Indie Biennial, The Boys Brigade, Port Sunlight, UK

2025 | The Space In Between, Indie Biennial, Port Sunlight, UK

2025 | The Stables, Indie Biennial, Ghost Art School, Port Sunlight, UK

2025 | CROSSROADS, Degree Show, Liverpool Hope University, UK

2025 | Drudenhaus Collective, Bridewell Gallery, Liverpool, UK

2024 | FACE Forward, Art for Wellbeing, Prescot, UK

2024 | Alternative Layers, Bridewell Gallery, Liverpool, UK

Awards

2025–2027 | Hope Arts Company Scholarship Recipient, Liverpool Hope University (one of three selected), MA fee waiver; community and prison arts facilitation placements.

2025 | Collection acquisition, Liverpool Hope University Permanent Collection (work acquired)

2025 | CASS Art First Prize, Liverpool Hope University Degree Show, Liverpool, UK

2025 | dot-art Prize: one-year membership award, Liverpool, UK

2025 | Freelands Painting Prize nominee, Liverpool Hope University, UK

2024 | Summer Scholarship 2024 recipient, Liverpool Hope University, UK

Symposia

2026 | Deep Listening: From Pauline Oliveros to Contemporary Practices | Tate Liverpool commission and symposium speaker, Liverpool Hope University, UK

2025 | H2O: How 2 Access the Waterways, Who Are the Water Turners | Tate Liverpool commission and symposium speaker, Liverpool Hope University, UK