Alison A Raimes – UK Artist

website@raimes.com

Bio

After a career as a chef on charter yachts and then as restaurant chef/owner of the Quo Vadis Seafood Restaurant in Plymouth, Alison began art studies at Plymouth College of Art and Design in 1992. This was followed by three years at Manchester Metropolitan University from 1994 – 1997, where she achieved a BA (Hons) in Fine Art.

Alison then spent 12 years working from a studio at Bow Arts Trust in East London before moving North in 2011 when she came to care for her elderly mother. She was the founding Director of the Whistle Art Stop, a community arts programme, serving the comunity of Haltwhistle and providing Arts Council Funded opportunities to recent Art Graduates.

For the last five years, Alison has devoted a great deal of her time to providing aid to Refugees in North France and befriending resetlled refugees in Newcastle and Northumberland. She is a foster carer and recently homed an unaccompanied young asylum seeker.

Alison welcomes visitors to her studio in Haltwhistle. Please use the contact page to arrange.

Exhibitions

‘LANDE: The Calais Jungle’ Pitt River Museum, Oxford March – Nov 2019
‘Resurgence’ 2016 The SHED exhibition space, Haltwhistle
‘Out of the Box’ 2014 The SHED exhibition space, Haltwhistle
Open Studios, Hadrian Enterprise Park, Haltwhistle, Northumberland – Oct 2012
Connection Point, London – selected show by Edward Lucie Smith & Max Presniell June 2011
‘Multicomplexificationalities’ curated by Roy Exley – 22nd Jun – 22nd Jul 2007, Nunnery Gallery, London E3
‘Chamber Works III’, ( in collaboration with Seth Brignell) at Bow Arts Trust Open Studio 2007
‘From the Stars Down to Earth’, curated by Andrew Hunt, Nunnery Gallery, Jun-Jul 2006
‘Chamber Works I’, (made in collaboration with Seth Brignell) at Bow Arts Trust 2006
Group Show: Bow Arts Trust Open Studios, June 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006
Group Show: HYPE, Brick Lane, London – Feb 2004
Artlives Exhibition: Reconcilable Differences, Jersey galleries, Osterley Park House, Heathrow, London 3 – 27th April 2003
Group Show:”Blurred Edges” – Alison A Raimes, Sam Stork, & Jules Sykes – Seven Seven Gallery, London 20 Feb-3rd March 2003
Group Show:Evans Collection, www.evanscollection.org 23rd Jan – 9th Feb 2003 Rivington Gallery, 69 Rivington Street, London EC2A 3AY
Group Show: Seven Seven Gallery, Broadway Market, Hackney, London “Snapshots” Nov 2002
Artlives International Group of artists
Skylark Gallery, Gabriel’s Wharf, South Bank, London SE1
Group Show: Art Beyond Borders, Sweden May 2001
Group Show: Art Beyond Borders, Drachten, The Netherlands, February 2001
Open Studios: Cable Street Studios, London E1 18 -20th December 2000
Affordable Art Fair, Battersea, London SW1 October 2001
Open Studios: Cable Street Studio, London E 1 9-11th June 2000
Group Show: Greenwich Arts New Generation: Blackfriars Arts Centre, January 2000
Group Show: Barley Mow Centre, “Invest in your sole” London W4 August 30 – September 15th 1999
Open Studios: Cable Street Studios, London E1 July 2-4th 1999
Solo Exhibition: “Intimate Inquiry into Nothingness” Bedford Hill Studios, Battersea, London Nov 1998
Solo Exhibition: Peterborough Art Centre May – June 1999 (previewed on Anglia Television)
Solo Exhibition: Eltham College

Latest Work

Alison is the lead artist at the Whistle Art Stop in Haltwhistle, a community arts group working with Young People. Alison has lead on the collection and delivery aid to Calais and Dunkirk since Sept 2015, through Northumberland Solidarity with Refugees group. She ran art workshops for the children in the Calais Jungle until it was demolished and continues to support refugees in UK and across Europe.

Her latest work is a series of paintings from photographs taken by volunteers working in the Refugee camp in Calais that became known as “The Jungle”. When the camp was demolished in November 2016, 10,000 refugees were dispersed across Europe of which over 1,000 of them were unaccompanied asylum seeking children.

This series of paintings “We are all Refugees” are made in solidarity with everyone who is displaced due to war or regime. 25% of all sales goes to Help Refugees

Portfolio and Projects

Community Arts

Community Arts, Photography

Street Art

Community Arts, Street Art

Sketches

Press

"I know why your art made me think of large expanses of fathomlessness. They look somewhat like the images from some telescopes of clusters distant galaxies. I had a gut reaction a little like that chap that went through the tunnel in 2001, but I couldn't figure out why I was connecting this to your images. The images are provocative in that they allow your mind to make its own connections. They suggest some abstract object to me or something very distant".

Paul Gates, (scientist) UK 2001

Paul Gates

"That moment of reflection taught me something else lost on-line, the size of these works. A painting that looked like a study under a microscope is five feet on a side. Imagined in its reality, it acquires the bare beauty of abstraction. Other images that somehow have ample room for points of ink-like detail, like a geode, run no more than a foot across. Large forms also have a strange fineness, but in motion. In that new triptych, a wave seems to have moved from left to right. It bursts the bounds of a single panel, like an Asian screen. Yet it, too, is small. Artists like to distinguish size from scale, but here the distinction has a way of unsettling what I think I saw ".

John Haber, (art writer) New York 2002

John Haber

“Brignell and Raimes’ DVD footage of inner and outer space, taken from extreme close-ups of hand made models, show trips into a subterranean world that are as much in the tradition of Jules Verne's A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1871) as they are science fiction voyages into unknown parts of the cosmos ”. Andrew Hunt: Catalogue for The Stars Down to Earth Exhibition at the Nunnery Gallery, London E2 June 2006

Andrew Hunt

"... the exhibition opens to a dreamlike world often on the edge of being frightening and alienating... This theatricality is staged by the artwork through its mode of display in Brignell and Raimes' Chamber Works where the visitor discovers moving images of intense fire by looking into small windows." Review by Vanessa Desclaux, AN Magazine Sept 2006

Vanessa Desclaux

"Working in a more overt way with light, Brignell and Raimes' installation invites the viewer into a private experience, where, on peeping ino the box and listening in to the headphones, you are drawn into a sci-fi fantasy world where all sense of the real world is occluded and we are not sure whether we are viewing scenes of a cosmic or molecular nature. As our everyday perceptiion, excluded from those realms of existence, is totally unequipped to interpret such scenes, we are left in a perpetual limbo. Disorientation would seem to be the natural viewing response here. The intriguing aspect of this work is how strange, apparently exotic, images and sounds can be produced from the prosaic, everyday materials that Brignell and Raimes use to create their work." Roy Exley, catalogue entry for 'Multicomplexificationalities" at the Nunnery, June 2007.

Roy Exley

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