Alison J Carr

'Intimacy Stages, Cleopatra's Lounge, Huddersfield, Downstairs', 2024, Alison J Carr

Alison J Carr is an artist, mentor, and independent scholar. She works visually and creates performances. Alison has shown her work nationally and internationally in USA and Europe. Career highlights include being a Site Gallery Platform / Freelands resident and co-editing Sex on Stage, with Dr Lynn Sally, forthcoming, Bloomsbury.

“I complicate easy dismissals of femininity and sexual bodily display in favour of deeper enquiry and rigorously researched complexity. For example, recently I co-edited Sex on Stage (Bloomsbury 2025) which uncovers how gender and sexuality collide on stage in dynamic, dramatic, and thought-provoking ways. Taking a broad view of sex and the stage, this book tracks influences across the underground, marginalised, and the mainstream, from ‘high’ contemporary live art to the ‘low’ of entertainment. Across these mediums, the staging of sex pushes against decorums of respectability, instead flaunting the body to shock, to entertain, to tell stories, and to display a new kind of gender expression. The subjects and contributors included in the book inhabit their bodies—in fact, demand the agency of the body—in self-authored ways. Gender and sexuality here are performative, and what comes into being challenges traditional constructions of both femininity and sexuality. In my art practice, I visualise the overlooked labour and lived realities of showgirls, whom I evoke as an archetype of sexiness and glamour and a complex web of relatable traits and desires. I appropriate imagery from Hollywood backstage musicals. I make drawings from found and archival images, I re-enact images making new videos or drawings. I video interview former chorus girls and pair their experiences with new soundscapes. I photograph theatres and strip clubs, noting how wonder and intimacy are staged through the construction of the spaces. The long exposures of my photographs of theatre interiors reflect aspiration, opulence and dust. The façade and the real. The reality of construction. These resonant and atmospheric spaces are haunted by the trials of optimism and human endeavour, of putting on a show.”

'What's Your Real Name?' 2024, Alison J Carr

Alison J Carr is an artist. She works visually and creates performances. Her work explores the complexities of feminine display, through responding to archival and found materials. She makes drawings, collages, texts, performances, photographs, and video, proposing theatres as sites of self-actualisation; classic Hollywood film sets as a location of avant-garde art; chorus girl troupes as networks of support and community, and strip clubs as spaces of transformation.

She depicts the visible contradictions of bodily display—between hyper-visibility and invisibility, the loud and voiceless, power and powerlessness—her work investigates the boundaries between pleasure in performance and quiet reflection, between exhibitionism and our own interior worlds.

She studied at the California Institute of the Arts, absorbing both the critical dialogue and the lure of the Hollywood facade. Following her sojourn to LA, she returned to Sheffield for a PhD at Sheffield Hallam University where she gained her undergraduate degree. Her book, Viewing Pleasure and Being A Showgirl: How Do I Look? was published by Routledge in 2018. She has co-edited Sex on Stage, with Dr Lynn Sally, forthcoming, Bloomsbury, 2025.

Visit the artist’s website and follow her on Instagram.
Also check out Joy Development

'They Danced As One' still from video work in progress, Alison J Carr