Alison Butler
Profile
The most formative years
of Alison Butler's life — the years that shaped her character as
a free spirit — were those between the ages of 7 and 10, when she
was growing up in Uganda, where her parents ran a school in a village
near the shores of the Kabaka's Lake. As the girls of her age were
already working in family small-holdings (shambas), Allie (as
she prefers to be known) played mostly with her brother and the village
boys: an idyllic Huckleberry-Finn existence, fishing, climbing trees,
and riding on giant tortoises. Her freedom to roam was largely due to
being wrongly diagnosed as having ‘learning difficulties’; as a
result, her education was neglected — but, as she recalls, “this
was my opportunity to start instinctively questioning things from first
principles”. Back in the UK after a second (less happy) stay in Uganda,
she attended a progressive school, Monkton Wyld, where she studied art
and film-making but left school with no formal qualifications.
After six months at drama school, Allie got into Bideford School of
Art “by the back door”. A three-year diploma course in restoring
and designing Architectural Stained Glass was followed by a degree course
in Three-Dimensional Design. A few years later she added another degree,
this time in Sculpture, from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art
in the University of Oxford. Between degrees she taught Art and Design
and began practising as a painter. She describes her work as abstract,
yet informed by her architectural and design training. Her large canvases,
displayed on the walls of her house in east Oxford, are characterised
by the subtlest of tones, developed from unique paint recipes using
gesso powders, pure pigments mixed with acrylic mediums, gums, and paint.
(We shall be able to see some of her work on Sunday 5th July, when Allie
and her partner have invited us to a garden party at their home.) Allie
says, “On reflection it was no accident that my brother and I both
grew up to become painters. Painting is largely a non-verbal form of
communication, and the fact that both our parents were deaf by the time
we were 10 and 13 certainly had an impact on us. And in London in the
1950s we were surrounded by artists and actors who were friends of our
parents.”
Allie has exhibited her work in London, Oxford, Bristol, and Krakov,
while working first as a teacher and then developing an arts career
in health care. She herself has overcome a lifetime of serious illness:
Graves Disease — an auto-immune disorder that causes thyroid dysfunction
— at various times has attacked her short-term memory, damaged her
eyesight, and compromised her language skills. Now in long-term remission
from the condition, she works for the regional Mental Health NHS Foundation
Trust as the co-ordinator of Artscape, a project using the arts to promote
social inclusion and creative engagement for service users, staff, and
Trust visitors. In 2008 she developed a Sculpture Walk and the Artscape
Gallery at the Warneford Hospital and organised a Music Festival celebrating
World Mental Health Day.
Allie believes there is a deep and direct connection between creative
intelligence and spiritual intelligence. Her own inner journey began
in childhood: raised a Roman Catholic, she attended catechism classes
from the age of 5 and was confirmed at the age of 7. Her doubts began
at her first confession (to a Monsignor, no less), when she could not
think of any sins that she had committed and had to invent one — for
which she had to perform 40 Acts of Contrition on a stone floor. And
her first Holy Communion made her aware of the implicit patriarchy of
the church: she was presented with a missal, while her brother received
an electric train set at his own first Communion. “I left Roman Catholicism
in my early adolescence, because in the African bush I had seen that
women's lives were being made doubly hard by religious strictures
imposed by missionaries. Feminist awareness came instinctively to me,
and Africa offered alternative ways of viewing the world. By the time
I was a young adult I had decided not to align myself with any faith
tradition. I felt bereft of fellowship but I knew that I had to stand
alone — or rather apart.”
Allie first encountered Unitarianism as a tourist, on a visit to the
chapel in Lewes, Sussex. The atmosphere of the chapel and its old library
left an impression that penetrated deep into her unconscious mind; several
years passed, and her friend and mentor, the writer, artist and critic,
Larry Berryman, a western Hindu, died prematurely. “During the months
after his death I reflected deeply on life — his and my own. Something
prompted me to look up Unitarianisn on the Internet, and I started to
read about it. I realised that I had probably been a Unitarian all my
life — by instinct, if not by practice. I have forgotten who preached
at the first service that I attended in the MCO chapel, but I remember
that the first hymn was about the quest for Truth. I wanted to cry for
joy, I had found a place to think and explore, with the freedom and
encouragement to do so.” Allie is now a member of the Chapel Committee
(elected at the AGM last December) and has undertaken a foundation course
in lay preaching. She led her first service several months ago in tandem
with Leo Bowder (“a wonderful learning process”) and will lead her
second service — on her own, this time — on 1st March.
In addition to the demands of her professional life, Allie spends much
time caring for her parents in Sussex, who are very frail. Her experience
of illness has taught her “to live in the present: our lives are finite,
how we spend them is vitally important”. She lives by the words of
Psalm 90, verse 12: “Teach us to measure our days aright, that
we may gain a heart of wisdom”.