Allison Ksiazkiewicz is an artist and scholar interested in the ways we tell stories about Nature and ourselves through natural history. Trained as a printmaker and as an historian of art and science, Allison combines her interests and experience in explorations of history and landscape in the making of cultural identities.
One facet of her work examines different modes of visualizing the deep past. Displays of natural history in Canadian and British museums and a broad interest in the curation of palæontological specimens have led her to study of those at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the Natural History Museum in London. Antiquarianism of the Enlightenment period acts as a springboard for the development of the earth sciences and features heavily in Allison’s published works and influences her artistic projects.
Allison has been Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and St Andrews Special Collections Library, and a BSECS/Bodleian Library Fellow. In 2015 she was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art to conduct new research for her book Archetypes of Nature: Visualizing Geological Landscape during the British Enlightenment. Her current collaborative art project Cultured Canines reconstructs ancient ceramic materials and processes to reflect on the making and meaning of twelve different dog breeds. Cultured Canines will be exhibited at the Ashmolean Museum in Spring 2021.