My art practice is mainly focused on drawing using close observation of the natural world as inspiration and a guide. When I am home in North East Fife I draw from the endlessly cyclical nature of the garden; the plants and processes which often serve as metaphors, and as teachers, for how we live. When I go to the West Coast, where I grew up, I draw from the vast expansive landscape and grapple with ideas of ineffability and notions of the sublime.

I like to work with paper as a surface to draw on, to make artist books, or to make plant-inspired cutouts and simple sculptural works.

Currently, I am working as an artist within local community lifelong education projects. I teach practical and exploratory visual art workshops emphasising looking at and engaging with aspects of the local natural environment.

Alison Philp’s work has been displayed in galleries across Scotland. She has a BA(Hons) in Drawing and Painting from Edinburgh College of Art and an MFA in Art and Humanities from Dundee University.

“Observation is a tool to empathise. When painters paint using observation they are empathising. Engaging in empathy is a psychological act made into a physical act when creating art. The painter is not gifting the viewer with a painting but with empathy. Empathy is the action that causes an aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is one which creates an enormous amount of empathy”.

Mary Jane Jacobs, ‘Dewey for Artists’ p94, 2018.