Alison Dollery

Alison Dollery is a visual artist, researcher, writer, and curator whose interdisciplinary practice uses her transformed body as a canvas, guided by research. Her award-nominated and internationally exhibited art includes artist talks at the Royal Academy of Art and performances at the Tate Modern in London.

She holds a First Class BA (Hons) in Fine Art from the UCA and an MFA in Art and Humanities from the Royal College of Art in London. Currently, she is pursuing her PhD in Art and Design at the University of Sunderland, supported by an awarded studentship from the Northern Bridge Consortium and the Helen McArdle Nursing and Care Research Institute, which co-funds her research into art-based methods within bariatric medicine and body image.

While I have not explicitly referenced the TV series or novel before, the timing of its 2017 release resonated with my feelings about my body during my medical transformation that year and influenced my visual work and writing, both of which embody the core themes of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.

My project, 'The Manufactured Body, ' confronts societal and medical control over the female body. By using my own body, transformed through medical interventions, as both medium and message, I reclaim agency over its perception. This approach reflects the novel's critique of patriarchal control and questions how society interprets bodies.

My refusal to beautify or to abjectify my body is a form of resistance.

Through honest, unedited images that document my body's transformation, my work serves as a form of activism. Displaying all scars and fluctuations, this radical visibility counters societal shame and silence, much like Offred’s internal monologue resists erasure in The Handmaid’s Tale.

Atwood explores how identity is stripped and reconstructed under authoritarian rule.

I invite you to reflect visually on bodies and identities shaped by external forces, such as culture, medicine, and stigma, echoing the novel’s themes of resistance and self-definition within oppressive systems.

"I use my body as a canvas because it is the material I know the best; it is malleable, transformable, ethical and honest..." 

(Dollery, 2020).”- Alison Dollery

 Alison Dollery is a visual artist, researcher, writer, and curator who uses her manufactured and transformed body as a canvas in her interdisciplinary practice as research.

Alison has an award-nominated, internationally exhibited art practice, including artist talks at the Royal Academy of Art and performances at Tate Modern in London. She holds a First Class BA (Hons) in Fine Art from the UCA and an MFA in Arts and Humanities from the Royal College of Art in London. She is currently studying for her PhD in Art and Design at Sunderland University, with a studentship from the Northern Bridge Consortium.

Helen McArdle, a Nursing researcher, is dedicating herself to art-based methods within bariatric medicine and body image.