Alison McKenna

Alison McKenna is a British artist, curator and co-founder of The Satellite Collective, an artist-led platform dedicated to work on paper. McKenna studied at Central Saint Martins, completing both a BA and MA, and works across painting, drawing, film, photography and collage. Her practice explores the relationships between landscape, memory and perception, with a particular interest in the energetics of place and the ways lived experience can be translated through material and colour.
The works presented at Fair Play originate from drawings made while travelling through Crete. These studies act as visual traces of encounters with landscape, architecture, light and movement, later becoming source material for paintings developed in the studio.

Paper functions as both support and active participant. Its folds, creases and fragile irregularities are retained within the work, while successive layers of water-based emulsion obscure and reveal the underlying image. This process creates a tension between surface and depth, presence and disappearance. Cobalt blues, burnt oranges, ochres, deep greens and chalky whites register the intensity of the Mediterranean landscape without seeking to reproduce it directly.