We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Alison Woods. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Alison below.
Alison, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?
I have learned that life is never in a straight line and successes can easily be followed by failures. All ventures have a life span and it can be difficult to maintain the same level of enthusiasm once you attain the pinnacle level of success for each venture. Oftentimes, we lose the drive and excitement once we have achieved our goals and need to redirect our energies into a new challenge to stay engaged.
I see setbacks as an opportunity for self-exploration and introspection. It is a time for re-evaluation of one’s life mission and a good time to try something different.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I am a visual artist. I am interested in making work that engages the public. I recently was invited to participate in an international exhibition “The Butterfly Effect” curated by Kostas Prapoglou in Athens, Greece where I produced a site-specific installation consisting of nine floating mixed media sculptures entitled “Chrysalis.” The exhibition included 41 international artists and was installed in a 100 year-old thread factory which is still in operation today. The exhibition was installed in the under-utilized areas of the factory, which employs around 150 people, but at one time employed well over a thousand. The exhibition was attended by over 75,000 people and received a lot of enthusiastic press.
I have also worked with the female-run artist space Supercollider whose mission is to connect artists with scientists to create engaging works expressing social and ecological issues through art. My recent solo exhibition “Metaclysm: Abstraction in the Virtual Age” included large format paintings and mixed media sculpture addressing the age of technology that we currently live in.
What distinguishes this particular era in art from its predecessors is the advent of the computer and the age of technology and AI. It can take the human hand over 1,000 human hours to do what a computer can do in seconds or minutes. The computer gives human beings superpowers. Its influence permeates all aspects of science, communication, industry, finance, infrastructure and entertainment. Computer networks connect humans to create a collective virtual consciousness, and the internet and AI knows us better than we know ourselves. The machine intelligence of the future may achieve a functional IQ of over 6,000 and have an understanding of science and technology that is inaccessible to the human brain.
I worked for 20 years in San Francisco during the formative years of the technology boom and was one of the early adopters of computer technology. I create works that incorporate complex computer-generated forms and shapes that could not have been designed without machine logic. The painstaking process of painting these images pits the limitations of the human body against the processing power of the computer. The resulting works ask the viewer to slow down and contemplate the phenomena of our technological times.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
I was always very curious and an avid reader. I am interested in everything from science to history to medicine and philosophy. As a child I loved to read the set of encyclopedias on our bookshelf and find the little treasures of information like entries on how people attempted to counterfeit money. My current inquiry is about the history of empires and what ultimately causes their downfall.
I never believed in “luck” or the magic of being “discovered.” It is said that the harder you work, the luckier you get. I have always had a strong work ethic, and I believe that it takes hard work and drive to achieve your maximum potential and goals. I also believe in visualizing where you want to go.
The third skill I had is a lifelong career as a creative, starting as a graphic designer, to being a partner in a design business and ultimately becoming a visual artist who also curates exhibitions. This accumulation of knowledge over my lifetime has allowed me to have the resources to create opportunities and think outside of the box.
My advice to folks who are starting out is to listen to your inner voice and develop healthy self- knowledge to know your true strengths and weaknesses. I suggest that they focus on directing their lives to capitalize on strengths while unpacking weaknesses.
We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?
One of the issues I have personally encountered is that unless I am willing to challenge my abilities and strengths and to address my weaknesses, I won’t be able to do what I want with my life.
As a child I was profoundly shy and introverted. Today, I might be labeled as having social phobia. This has been an ongoing struggle I work to overcome. When I became partner in a graphic design firm, I was forced to overcome these challenges. I had to give presentations to highly educated and accomplished business leaders, and to talk at business conferences to an entire auditorium filled with professionals.
I find that my strengths need to be constantly developed and maximized. I sometimes think of myself as being a piece of software that needs to be constantly developed and improved. I think I am on version 7.0 now.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.alisonwoods.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alisonwoodz/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alison.woods.9678
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/woodsalison/
Image Credits
IMAGES FROM “The Butterfly Effect” and “Metaclysm: Abstraction in the Virtual Age.” Photographers Sandra Osborne, Kostas Prapoglou, Brian Thomas Jones
