Meet the Artist - Allison Bowman

Allison Bowman is a Kansas artist who utilizes natural imagery in collage and oil painting to examine and escape her own anxiety. Her current collection, Ornithologist’s Dream, creates imagined environments using abstracted botanical forms. It hangs in the Cider Gallery through February 17th. 

In 2015, Bowman was diagnosed with severe anxiety disorder, and she turned to art as a therapeutic outlet. She began taking walks and exploring nature to relax. Every piece is unique to the current mood and imagined environment she creates. Bowman builds “around 50 layers of translucent paint to create a background and each one is a reaction from the previous layer.” Every layer, a piece of her emotional mindset weaves its way in, inspiring color choices and forms. Bowman works with the media itself, creating an intuitive partnership with the material. To her, “making is a process of letting go and escaping” into the sacred space that a new piece creates. 

  As a Kansan, Allison Bowman has always taken inspiration from the natural environments around her, both real and imagined. Like the many layers in her collage work, Bowman sees nature as movable and resilient stating, “plants are able to adapt and evolve to thrive in every condition they are in.”She graduated from Kansas State University in 2017 with a BFA in Fine Arts, where she formed an artistic appreciation for professor Nancy Marrow. During her time in the Manhattan area, her pieces were primarily inspired by a connection to the Konza prairie. Since moving to Kansas City, her “love of the Prairie has grown more” as she feels an absence of the vast landscape she once took for granted. Today, she creates art in Kansas City that draws from the Konza Prairie, jungle environments, and misty forests.

- Nina Tran and Sarah Jane Dahms