Alison Hunt Ballard
interview KRISTIN WINTERS
Wolves and women run free — they dance together and leap through the woods, through houses, and through the pages. But where are they heading and what do they seek? Red ink becomes blood as teeth are barred, the walls of the home close in, igniting fear the need for escape, and the wild woods are just as a foreboding refuge. This is not a fairytale — this is the world of Alison Hunt Ballard.
Alison is a printmaking and artist-bookmaking artist currently residing in Palm Springs. Born and raised in Idllywild, she grew up isolated from much of modern day necessities, yet had a rich experience exploring the mountains and wilderness which would later become a central theme in her work. Alison graduated from California College of the Arts in 2008, with a BFA in Printmaking and Bookmaking. The Bay-Area metropolis was a stark contrast to her childhood home, and where she flourished and refined her craft. Alison’s Prints and Artist Books tell a primeval story set in the modern world- a tale of humans and animals facing each other and danger lurking where you least expect it.
KRISTIN WINTERS: Can you you tell us your personal background and how you came to be an artist?
ALISON HUNT BALLARD: I grew up in the mountains, in Idyllwild, California, and it was a very small, obviously, limited town. With its charms, yes. I think that the ruralness of it and the very mountainous quality of it and the very dark and silent aspect of it, very much influenced a lot of my language and my work.
Certainly, I was very excited to go to San Francisco and I fit in much better in the Bay Area in terms of my peers and people there. My family is very typically mid-western. They come from the mid-west and they are very religious. They’ve very Christian. They’re very Republican. They’ve all been in Idyllwild forever. Generation after generation. My mother died when I was young, which also informed a lot of my wanting to be an artist and having an outlet to talk about things that were hard. She died of cancer and it was a very long arduous process that I watched at a very young age that was very transformative. After my mother died, my grandparents inherited me.
I’ve been making work for a long time. Though only recently do I feel like it’s taken on the life that I’ve been trying to find. I think artists spend a lot of time finding their language and finding the right fit and the right mediums and the right way of making things that express what they’re trying to express and talk about what they’re trying to talk about.
KW: How did growing up in Idyllwild influence your work?
AHB: The mountain is always this huge influence on me and being raised in a place that was very isolated and very much still apart from modern living.
We had the benefit as kids of just running out into the woods and nobody is stopping us and our parents not really wondering where we were going even though we were out in the middle of nowhere. Being very connected in that sense to animals and to trees and to nature, in a way that a lot of modern children don’t have.I think that definitely influences a lot of the ways that I interact with my imagery too, in my work.
KW: How did you discover printmaking and bookmaking, and how do those mediums speak to your art?
AHB: [Originally] I went to college as a fine art major. Basically, that really just means painting and drawing. It was my second year in college, I had been going through the whole painting and drawing curriculum and things just weren’t really lining up. The print shop was right below the painting and drawing studios. I’d always seen the print makers down there and we always shared cigarette breaks together.
I was watching their process and their process really spoke to me, the way that they were making work. Then I realized that it was connected to books — I always wanted a way to use words and language in my work. Painting just wasn’t cutting it. Using words in painting. You can do it but it wasn’t the right fit for me.
When I found bookmaking, I was like, “This is it for me. I can speak in a more narrative way.” Because my work is very narrative. I was always trying to tell a story. I like to think of myself as a storyteller. I think in pages. I think in a linear way.
When I realized that there was this option that I could actually major in printmaking and bookmaking, that I could start to talk about what I needed to talk about. It was liberating. Because painting, you get one shot, you get one canvas, it’s one thing. It’s one final piece. Whereas when you’re working with a book, you have multiple different pages that you’re working with.
I think artists spend a lot of time finding their language and finding the right fit and the right mediums and the right way of making things that express what they’re trying to express and talk about.
— Alison Hunt Ballard
KW: In your own words, how would you define what a book is, or what a book can be?
AHB: From an artistic perspective, to me, a book is just a way of communicating. Whether that is in a traditional book form or in a more sculptural idea of communication, it’s [another] way of telling stories. It’s a way to communicate to other people and really, what I think artists are doing or what I’m doing as an artist is it’s having a conversation.
For me, the traditional book structure never really … Again, that was also a limitation
KW: A traditional book that people are used to thinking of are very different from your work, which is books as art objects.
AHB: What happens is when you exhibit a book like that, when you put a book like that in a gallery or in a space, nobody wants to touch it. No one’s going to touch it, because to them it’s art, it’s untouchable. You look at them, you don’t touch it. That’s a real problem when all of your content and everything you’re trying to talk about is inside
My way of getting around that was starting to make more sculptural objects that, to me, were books, but were sculptures in a way that people could approach and interact with and understand the content without having to open and go page by page.
KW: What has been the viewers response to your books as an exhibited art object?
AHB: For me, the best reactions that I’ve ever gotten to my work have been from children. I use symbols that children recognize as houses or animals, things that you would normally see in children’s books. Kids, they want to go up. They want to touch it. They want to move it around and I couldn’t be happier when that happens. A lot of my work is interactive where you go inside, you pull things out or whatever. Kids don’t hesitate with that stuff. They’re interacting with it in a much more authentic way. I’ve had good response from adults too. It’s always a little bit different.
I want to have conversations with the average viewer, and I want them to be able to approach the work and to find something of themselves in it and to be able to tell themselves a story about it as well and identify very archetypal things from childhood or from their own experiences or from dreams or things that they understand as these symbols that they can then interpret for themselves and create the self-analytical or introspective way of considering something.
KW: What are the themes and concepts behind your work?
AHB: For me, what I’ve always been fascinated with and why art is so great is the joy of discovery or the sense of exploration. Art is a very strange behavior. People who want to make art, you could just go hiking or you could do yoga. There are so many people who never make art.
For me, the very cool nature of that is, yeah, the excavation or the exploration of something or an idea or a theme. I’ve always been just endlessly fascinated with people and their motivations and what’s going on with people and the idea of consciousness and the idea of us as human beings being evolved animals and moving away from our sense of self as mammals into this more higher sense of self as people human beings.
I think a lot about people’s motivations and what’s the root of behavior and what’s the root of a lot of these issues that people face that are unique to humans and not to animals. Most of my work has always dealt with that form of exploration.
I think art is very political, whether we mean to be political artists or not. I think that art reflects the political and the social and the cultural climate of the time. When I look at things, I think we all think a lot about what’s going on in the world, things like racism and sexism.
When I distill it down for myself, to me, it really comes back to a sense of human’s behavior and what is the root cause of the reasons we lash out or the reasons we create in us versus them or with the reasons that we have hatred.
I think that art is a way into tackling those issues. Through our evolution, there’s been this push away from the animal- we are different, we are separate and we’re elevated and we’re different from them, we’re not animals, we’re people.
By trying to push down the animal, we’ve ignored it completely- but we still are animals and we still have this raw instinct that boils under the surface. For me, there’s always this tension between the human mind and the animal mind essentially and which part of us wins out in any given circumstance.
For me, this series is really dealing with that tension and that dichotomy between the two. We all have this restlessness inside of us. We want to be human and we want to have all these successes: the car, the house, the job. Yet even when we have all those things, we have this sense in ourselves -We just want to throw off everything and go live in the woods and fuck it all.
I think that’s that inner sense of animal coming out where it’s like we aren’t meant for this: We aren’t meant to be trapped by all this stuff and we aren’t meant to go to jobs 40 hours a week, 50 hours a week. There’s very much this animal scratching inside of everyone and how we choose to let that animal control our behavior. It can either be this pet that sits inside of us like a good dog or a wolf that comes out and destroys everything. Tacking that inside of ourselves, I think, is the like the jumping off point to being able to tackle the larger issues that we are facing as a culture and as a world.
From an artistic perspective, to me, a book is just a way of communicating. Whether that is in a traditional book form or in a more sculptural idea of communication, it’s [another] way of telling stories. It’s a way to communicate to other people and really, what I think artists are doing or what I’m doing as an artist is it’s having a conversation.
— Alison Hunt Ballard
KW: You have a lot of symbols and archetypal images in your work — Can you describe how you use them?
AHB: I always use houses as a sense of the domestic and a sense of civilization and the human side of things. I use trees or animals as the wild aspect of our psyches and of our personalities. Same with the color — I use a simplistic color of pallet to talk about things that are very whitewash, things that are pure versus things that are very raw and very open.
KW: All these images together in your work seem to paint a picture of a fairytale.
AHB: I think folklore is really important. Again, that goes back to the sense of narrative and storytelling, and that being a very archetypal consistent way that people understand talking about themselves and the world.
You go back as far as civilization, as far as humanity and they were telling stories in symbols and in parables that helped population understand their place in the world or understand their place in their own culture. We used ideas and characters and these archetypal symbols to talk about lessons we should learn or things we should know or ways that we should approach the world. In a lot of ways I think I am making more modern fairy tails or folklore.
I think even if you go back to the Little Red Riding story- it’s a very linear conclusion to draw from the images and symbols. That was very much a story about that sense of the domestic being safe or not safe. The sense of dark wood being the unknown or the mysterious. Certainly, from a child’s perspective. What does that mean, to go into the unknown or the mysterious, and how do we approach that?
Again, that goes back to my hope that people take the opportunity to be introspective within themselves and have more personal and self-analytical experience with these symbols and ideas that are so much taken for granted in our lives and in the current state of the world.
I really would hope that people [when viewing my work] will be able to sit with that sense of being unsettled and that sense of discomfort and be able to talk to themselves about that. “Why am I uncomfortable? Why does this feel unsettling? What about that is inside of me? What is happening there?”
I think we were wolves once, and I would like people to sit with that notion.