A Shrine to Something | Alison Dilworth

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Alison Dilworth is a Philadelphia-based artist, muralist, and shrine-maker whose work spans the profoundly private and the intensely public. She is also someone who has spent her adult life thinking about what it costs to hold things — grief, love, other people's stories, a kid running toward traffic — and what it means to be genuinely present to any of it.

We talk about what it means to make a shrine, and how that practice bleeds into everything else she makes. We talk about the difference between curiosity and bearing witness — and why that distinction matters more than it might seem. We talk about girlhood, about what it felt like to watch herself become visible to men before she had any framework for it, about the refusal that followed, and about the door she's walking through now on the other side of all that. We talk about a miscarriage, a snow cone, and a little girl named Dagitu who showed up at exactly the right moment without knowing why. And we talk about an elder neighbor with a shovel and a gaze that went straight through her.

Alison is one of the people who taught me — without trying to — that holding space is a real thing you can do in the world. Talking to her again after fifteen years was a genuine joy.

In this conversation:

• Making art in Philadelphia vs. New York — and why "time-rich" is the thing
• The handmade books that hold other people's stories and are never for anyone else
• What attention actually is, and what it means that it's been captured
• Curiosity as childlike wonder vs. bearing witness as ethical presence
• What it felt like to become visible to men as a girl, and the refusal that followed
• Pregnancy loss, the Magic Gardens, and Dagitu's snow cone
• Why she doesn't respect grownups — and why elders and children are the only ones worth being
• Perimenopause as threshold
• What it means to honor something invisible
• The Norris Holmes mural: Sky Woman, Eve, Alice, Miss Gloria — women who chose wisdom over safety
• Why the process is everything and the finished thing isn't hers anymore

...more of Alison's work: https://www.instagram.com/brainsoulface/

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