Alison Overton: Artist Profile

Alison Overton

A native of North Carolina and life-long artist Alison Overton has been photographing since 1980. She earned a BA in Environmental Design in 1982 from North Carolina State University’s School of Design.

Alison was awarded Regional Artists Project Grants for 2002, 2004, and 2008 from the North Carolina Arts Council. In 2009 she was granted the Sarah Everett Toy Memorial Award, a full scholarship to study photography at Penland.

Her work has been exhibited in galleries and/or universities in California, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, and West Virginia, as well as the Artspace Galway Gallery in the Republic of Ireland.

Corporate collections include: North Carolina University’s Gregg Museum of Art and Design, Louisburg College Permanent Gallery Collection, Credit Suisse First Boston Headquarters, Saks Fifth Avenue, SAS Institute, and the City of Raleigh Arts Commission. Alison’s work is in private collections throughout the United States, and in Canada, Denmark, England, France, and New Zealand.

Alison lives and works in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Making art, in particular photographs that chronicle a moment in a changing landscape, is my passion. I strive constantly to explore and expand my definition of the unique and mysterious in life and nature. Utilizing simple, manual film cameras such as the Holga 120S, I capture images that have an ethereal and timeless quality.

One of the recurring themes in my work is the architectural landscape with a sense of history. My intent in making these photographs is to visually convey the feeling of walking alone among quiet and peaceful sites, both secular and sacred. By combining overlapping exposures, careful cropping and finally overpainting with transparent oil paints, the finished works reveal my idea of these places as they might appear in a daydream or on another plane of existence, and as if our rules of time, space and perspective did not apply.

Recently, my parents’ collection of curious antiques has inspired me to shoot staged vignettes digitally. I have made over one hundred brightly colored images of small scale objects, grouped with intriguing flora and deceased, small fauna.

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