Allison Biggs is an artist and poet working across installation, new media, and text.

Her practice centers on the interior life — how memory distorts, how identity performs, how we locate ourselves within the places and systems that shape us.

Her work moves between the observational and the lyrical, drawing on perception, archetype, and the intimacies of selfhood to ask what it means to experience anything at all. Her installation series On (2024–ongoing) is a three-part immersive work exploring Archetypes, Memory, and Perception through projected text and ambient sound. Conceived as a triptych environment, the work invites viewers into a slowed, contemplative encounter with the structures underlying human experience. On is currently in development alongside her debut poetry collection Affairs of the Self — poems examining contemporary selfhood, surveillance, and the performance of identity.

Studies on Place is both a body of work and an ongoing practice. The original series — a collection of artist zines made from travel — documents place through the lens of memory, perception, and human experience, treating the encounter with a city or landscape as a kind of phenomenological record. The practice continues on Substack, where she publishes essays, poems, and reflections from the On series alongside wider meditations on belonging, eros, creativity, and the examined life. She is currently a selected resident at Can Serrat International Art Center in El Bruc, Spain (October 2026), where she will develop On for installation and her poetry manuscript.

View Studies on Place · Read on Substack · Editorial

On (2024-ongoing)

WRITING & INSTALLATION

Three-part immersive installation exploring Archetypes, Memory, and Perception through projected text and ambient sound.

  • Spatial diagram of 20x20 gallery space

    Outline of installation space, technical setup, and viewer experience.

  • Mockup of open booklet

    Spread from the original zine concept, featuring the text, “Nothing you experience is uniquely your own.”

  • White text on black background

    Still from one wall of the triptych-style animation experience, featuring the text, “Nothing you experience is uniquely your own.”

  • Reference image from Jenny Holzer’s exhibition ‘the whole truth’ hosted at bergamo’s palazzo della ragione. © designboom

Poetry Collection (2025-2026)

Affairs of the Self is a collection about the impossibility of intimacy when you can't stop watching yourself. These poems move between obsessive self-examination and failed attempts at connection. Grounded in physical specificity and psychological complexity, the collection asks: what happens when you're so consumed by performing for yourself that genuine connection becomes impossible?

Affairs of the Self

I have entered into a love affair with myself.

Her desire infects me.

Her denial disrupts.

She calls and I answer, 

she sighs and I rejoice.

When she is silent, 

I yearn to know her.

I yearn too 

to be known by her.

In her passion 

I am taken by

her wants and needs, 

her greed and

her insolence

at finding

lacking in her days.

She is sultry.

She is exacting.

My self is lost to all,

but especially to her.

Softly at times,

I hear her whisper

and I wonder if 

for me, too,

she yearns.

I fear I may rupture soon.

When a spleen ruptures, does it know it is coming?

Is there buildup, plot, suspense, climax?

Is there resolution?

Does a spleen exist in order to rupture

or does it rupture as a rebellion to its existence?

Does a spleen know it may not rupture,

that it may exist in impassivity to the elements

which demand its eventual distress?

Does a spleen hurt when it ruptures?

Does it wail and double over in pain and loss?

Does a spleen, deep down, wish to rupture?

Does it desire to upend and explode its circumstance

so that it may be repaired, or remade, or removed?

Do I, too?

She moves without tenderness.

Quickly and categorically 

she inspects her surroundings 

and pays no heed to 

her own body.

Her gaze is direct and unyielding, 

and she is incapable 

of softening it in the name 

of hunger or desire.

Only redirection

can alter her intent.

She does not speak 

but for demands.

Though in her dreams,

at times, she croons

an indeterminable song

to the unlistening world.

She is soft to the touch,

though she has sharp edges,

and to touch her 

is to love her,

though earning her love 

is temperamental.

For exhibition, residency, and collaboration inquiries:

BIGGSALLI25@GMAIL.COM