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-as-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
