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Bio
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Allison Underhill is an interdisciplinary artist whose work focuses on process and action. She uses primarily craft and fiber processes, and often integrates performance and videography. She earned her MFA in Sculpture from California State University, Fullerton and her BFA in Drawing and Painting from Azusa Pacific University. Originally from Bakersfield, CA, Allison is now based in Vista, CA. She is currently teaching at California State University Fullerton.
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Statement
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Allison Underhill's work explores the relationship between repetition, disruption, and meaning. In her work, she utilizes repeated gestures (like knots, weaves, and markings) that build structure over time. These repeated gestures form patterns that hold order, intention, and meaning. Yet within the repetition also lies an openness. Patterns can shift or even break, providing moments of change that ask for closer attention, revealing and reforming meaning. The act of making and breaking patterns becomes a way of seeing—of drawing closer to meaning both within the structure and its unraveling, and both within the work and beyond it.
The work moves between making/acting and observing/noticing. Each piece is a conversation between maker and material, intention and accident, clarity and confusion. There is a curiosity at the center, a desire to find something beyond form and actions. There is always an intention to achieve or communicate something, but the process resists full control. It requires pausing, responding, and allowing the work to take a form that could not have been planned. While patterns and disruption emerge through the work, they are also sought outside of it: in behavior, in memory, in nature, in coincidence.
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At its heart, the work wrestles with truth. Human truth is shaped by experience. It is emotional, changeable, deeply personal, raw, vulnerable, and real. It is also fragile and incomplete. There is another truth that exists beyond experience, one which is whole, constant, and never fully knowable. The work seeks to acknowledge the tension between the two and slowly reconcile the former to the latter.
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CV
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​EDUCATION
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MFA, 2021, Sculpture, California State University, Fullerton, CA
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2019-2020, California State University, Long Beach, CA (Fiber Arts, Graduate Critique, nine units transferred to CSUF for credit to MFA)
BFA, 2015, Drawing and Painting, Azusa Pacific University, Azusa, CA
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SOLO EXHIBITIONS
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2025, pattern - seeking, Duke Art Gallery, Azusa Pacific University, Azusa, CA
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2021, Work and Word, MFA Thesis, workandword.com (virtual exhibition), with California State University, Fullerton, CA
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2018, Fragile Instruments, California State University, Fullerton, CA
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2015, I cannot rest., BFA Thesis, Duke Art Gallery, Azusa Pacific University, Azusa, CA
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GROUP EXHIBITIONS
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2023-2024, Plaza Banner Project, Fullerton Free, Fullerton, CA
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2022-2024, Project Blank Space, Fullerton Free, Fullerton, CA
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2022, Please Wait, Saddleback Art Gallery, Mission Viejo, CA
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2021, SoCal MFA Virtual 2021 Exhibition, socalmfa.squarespace.com (virtual exhibition), with Claremont Graduate University, CA
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2021, CSUF MFA @ MUZEO, MUZEO Museum & Cultural Center, Anaheim, CA
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2019, Graduate Critique Week, Ferreira Gallery, California State University, Long Beach, CA
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2019, Craft Revolution, Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Ana, CA
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2018, Now Trending: Third Annual Alpay Scholarship University Student Juried Exhibition, Palos Verdes Art Center, Rancho Palos Verdes, CA
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2018, SoCal MFA 2018 Juried Exhibition, Millard Sheets Art Center, Pomona, CA, with Claremont Graduate University, CA
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2014, ONE and Ten, Gallery p Three, Pomona, CA
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2013, Ampersand, Gallery p Three, Pomona, CA
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AWARDS
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2017-2021, Millie and Dale Hallberg Award, California State University, Fullerton, CA
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TEACHING EXPERIENCE
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2021-present, Lecturer, California State University, Fullerton, CA
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2023-2024, Art Instructor, Irvine Valley College, Irvine, CA
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2019, Teaching Associate, California State University, Fullerton, CA
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