While the spaces into which Alison Flora leads us may seem familiar at first glance, they are in fact the result of an arrangement of very personal recollections inspired by books, cinema and popular culture (gothic novels or fantasy films, history and esoteric books).
Labyrinths, medieval architectures, and forests of thorny and withered trees become spaces filled with creatures both common and unusual — human, animal or hybrid — that seem to have jumped straight out of the capitals of Romanesque art or medieval illuminations. Alison Flora’s world draws from legends and folk tales, particularly Occitan folklore, and scours these imaginary worlds for the most frightening characters, the foggiest atmospheres and the gloomiest stories, weaving a tenuous but striking thread between this past heritage and contemporary society, with its daily fears and monsters.
On paper or canvas, her drawings, which the artist started producing obsessively and cathartically from a very young age, become paintings through the use of a substance that is both symbolic and “visceral”: her own blood, which she draws intravenously following a very precise medical protocol devised to not impact her health.
The choice of this specific material, which affords the artist a “hyperproximity with her medium”, alters the status of her drawings radically, imbuing her practice with a magical dimension born from an almost sacrificial physical and spiritual communion, which places her work in a tradition of artists who used their own body as an essential tool in their output.
Alongside these paintings, Alison Flora’s work also includes her dark ambient musical project Sopoorific, as well as installations involving assemblages of various elements and materials (crystals, bones, chains, iron), in which the magical and ritual dimensions are conveyed through the choice of mediums and their arrangement, whether it be altars, votive offerings or totems.

Translated by Lucy Pons, 2024