Alanna Dodd

The good thing about being an artist is that you can express yourself, declare what you love and, yes, even indulge your obsessions. Like many of her contemporaries, such as artists like Elizabeth Peyton and Karen Kilimnik, Alanna does all of this. Much of her art making has been devoted to one of her great loves, James Hird.

We had a great time in the Arts Project Australia Archives looking through Alanna’s work with her. She has aptly shown that both love and painting are powerful things. To paraphrase Peyton, Alanna has shown how painting can become an opportunity to transform your ideas and thoughts about a person into a meditation- and how they become the occasion.