Alison Raby is a narrative painter and printmaker who uses collage and the theatrical staging of models to construct imaginary worlds or “heterotopias” that mirror, unsettle, or invert the real. She is particularly drawn to reflections and views through windows, which disrupt the familiar and act as portals into alternative realities. Masks appear as a reference to Bakhtin’s theory of carnival – a ritual spectacle in which traditional ideas and power structures are temporarily suspended.

As Foucault writes, “Heterotopias are not utopias but disruptions of the familiar, exposing the multiplicity of spatial orders. They frame space as layered, contradictory and charged with symbolic surplus.” Bachelard similarly describes windows as metaphorical thresholds that bend reality, invite introspection, and connect disparate worlds. In Alison’s work, these devices operate as liminal spaces between the known and unknown, the viewer and the subject, and the physical and spiritual realms.

Her practice also engages with the legacy of surrealism. While male surrealists often cast women as the muse – naïve, childlike, sexually aware yet passive or unstable – many women artists (who frequently rejected the surrealist label) confronted their own realities with boldness and resilience in male‑dominated environments. Alison’s art reflects her own career in science and commerce, working in “a man’s world,” and her interest in women who refuse to be constrained by gender stereotypes.

Questions of self in disguise, the “monstrous feminine,” inverted realities, and the charged atmosphere of psychological space recur throughout her work. As Leonora Carrington observed, “Most of us, I hope, are now aware that a woman should not have to demand Rights. The Rights were there from the beginning; they must be Taken Back Again.”