Alison Ballard
Alison Ballard is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores changing notions of presence, attention, and lived experience within a technologically mediated world. Working across moving image, installation, sound, text, and live performance, her work examines how technology reshapes subjectivity, memory, the body, and our experience of time. Works including Wasted Labour, winner of the Main Prize at the Nottingham Castle Open (2016), Narrating the Barbican, The Narrator is Present, and An Hour explore productivity, surveillance, storytelling, duration, waiting, and the tension between measured and lived time.
Collaboration and participation are central to Ballard’s methodology, with performers and audiences often becoming active contributors through acts of listening, waiting, counting, and sustained attention. Her practice values vulnerability, care, and shared experience over spectacle and productivity, creating spaces for reflection and critical awareness. Alongside her artistic practice, Ballard has an extensive educational background, having lectured in Fine Art and Moving Image at Goldsmiths, Nottingham Trent University, and London Metropolitan University, as well as working independently as a coach. Her pedagogical experience informs an accessible and ethical approach grounded in dialogue, process, and sustained engagement with diverse audiences.
