Alison Jackson

Alison Jackson
Alison Jackson, Haifa Museum of Art, March 2017
Born	Alison Mowbray-Jackson 15 May 1960 (1960-05-15) (age 57) Southsea, Hampshire, England
Education	Chelsea College of Art and Design Royal College of Art
Occupation	Artist, photographer
Website	AlisonJackson.com

Alison Jackson (born Alison Mowbray-Jackson, 15 May 1960) is a British BAFTA and multi award-winning artist who explores the cult of celebrity culture as created by the media and publicity industries. Jackson makes works about celebrities doing things in private using lookalikes. Jackson comments on the public's voyeurism, the power and seductive nature of imagery, and on their need to believe. The artist's work has established wide respect for her as an incisive, funny and thought-provoking commentator on the burgeoning phenomenon of contemporary celebrity culture. Jackson works across all media and arts platforms in television, digital, books, and is widely exhibited in galleries and museums attracting extensive interest in the press and on TV. Jackson has won a BAFTA for her BBC 2 series Doubletake and collected awards from 'Infinity', the Photographers Gallery, 'The Best of the Best' and 'Creative Circle' over the years. She has also published four collections of her photographic work.

Jackson graduated with BA (Hons) in Fine Art Sculpture from the Chelsea College of Art and Design as an adult student. Here she established herself as an abstract painter, completing a small number of critically acclaimed works. Soon after, in 1997, her graduation piece, Crucifix, was the first exhibit at a gallery. It was priced at £1,500 and five years later it was valued at ten times that amount. Jackson went on to gain her MA in Fine Art Photography from the Royal College of Art, London.

She became notorious in England in 1999 for producing black-and-white photographs including images that apparently showed Princess Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed with a mixed-race love child. The photographs were part of her graduation series entitled Mental Images. She has gone on to produce similarly obscured photographs and films of celebrities using lookalikes in surprising or thought-provoking situations, portraying them, as she has described it, 'depicting our suspicions'.