Allie Carr

2 Last updated  24 January 2023

8 Google Scholar Citations

I joined the University of Huddersfield in September 2017 as a Lecturer in Contemporary Art and Illustration. Previously I have been employed as an PTHP at Huddersfield. I have worked in the Fine Art and Communication Studies departments at Sheffield Hallam University since 2009, initially as a teaching researcher while I completed my PhD, and subsequently as an associate lecturer. I worked across all levels delivering workshops, studio and theory lecturing.

I am a practicing artist, having studied at the California Institute of the Arts, absorbing both the critical dialogue and the lure of the Hollywood facade. Following my sojourn to LA, I returned to Sheffield to do a PhD at Sheffield Hallam University where I had completed my undergraduate degree. I have edited my PhD thesis into a book—‘Viewing Pleasure and Being A Showgirl: How Do I Look?’ published by Routledge in 2018.

I was a Terra Summer Residency fellow in Giverny France and a LoBe Gallery resident in Berlin. I was awarded an Arts Council England ‘Grants for the Arts’ award in 2017. In 2018 I was selected to become part of the first cohort of the a Freelands Art Programme through Site Gallery Sheffield, and a-n mentoring scheme recipient working with the curator, Lucy Day. 

I have shown work internationally in LA, Indiana, and Berlin, and nationally in London, Sheffield, Leeds, Huddersfield, Manchester and Blackpool. Highlights include: curating an exhibition at the University of Huddersfield’s Market Gallery and a solo exhibition at Bloc Projects. I performed my first longer length solo performance, Bubikopf, in Sheffield and Newcastle. Recent commissions include a new performance for S1 Artspace / Making Ways for the Construction House season of events, staged at DINA, Sheffield.

Advertising images of women’s bodies that construct and repeat (ad infinitum) a connection between physical perfection and commodification drives my work. I contrast these with work created to reframe the female body as imperfect, yet glamorous, and located in contexts of radical thought and disruptive intentions, where excess is not only about consumption, but mostly about pleasure. I take entertainment seriously and ask if it can be tooled to rupture our cultural conditioning towards neoliberal individuality. My work proposes that political agency can be joyful and expansive.

I qualified as an Iyengar Yoga teacher in 2016 and teach at the Sheffield Yoga Centre and Zag Yoga, Sheffield.

media, representation, photography, performance, voice, embodiment, bodily display, feminisim, femininity, glamour, and pleasure.