Alana and Hugh Grant

Meet the Artist

E Alana James, EdD  – Artist, Author, Researcher – Alana is a digital artist whose practice sits at the intersection of ideas about qualitative research, activism on ageism, and using AI and other technological advances as part of the evolution of artistic outputs. Since 2020, she has pioneered life story portraiture, evolving the practice to include AI generated abstraction to capture emotions from metadata and the use of video effects in increasingly immersive environmental installations.
 
As an author, Alana wrote textbooks on action research methodology and the rigors of analytic thought. Her books stress the ways and means academic research can be used by regular people, communities and business to develop projects and new ways of working together.
 
As a researcher, Alana formerly worked with principals and teachers in schools to develop systems that would allow children whose families were living without a home to enter a school and be educated without suffering alienation due to their circumstances. Her interest in the ways and means that the minutiae of our pasts may continue to influence entire lives developed from these early research experiences and contributes to the ideas behind her artwork today.
 
Alana’s journey as an artist began in the 1970s with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, with honours, from the University of Colorado, USA, and a certificate to teach art in public schools.  For the next six years she was the art department at a small jr/sr high school in rural Colorado and that is where her love of working with others began.  

Alana’s art has been shown throughout her career in Independent Artistic Situations (ITAs).  Most notably as a member of Core New Art Space Collective in Denver, Colorado, USA and recently in Kinsale Atlantic Artists in Ireland.  Her early work gained notoriety with a one-woman show featuring the “Zappa Quilt,” a piece so captivating it was filmed by Playboy TV.

Alana wrestles with the difficulties inherent in translating big ideas and questions to various forms of visual outputs.  As she tells us, “I spent two years investigating what is truly important to people near the end of life. As I reflected, I learned that what mattered most to me was how it felt to hear their stories and to imagine their lives. People’s reactions to the What Matters show, Gallery 23 in Kinsale Jan 16th-15th, 2026 will help me determine my next steps

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Digital Art and Research Processes

Regarding her artmaking process, Alana says:

 “I started making art collage in 1976, after a drawing took 6 months to finish. Now, digital technology allows me to work almost as fast as my brain can imagine. My techniques developed as technology did.  At first, “compositing” was only prints on paper, sized up and down on zerox machines and glued to each other.  Now it is digital, some created by AI, others collaged on a tablet and, eventually, merged in film. Each digital technology is chosen according to the task at hand. 
 
Current tools include:
  1. Procreate for collaging multiple digital images to tell the story of their lives, and for merging those with abstract feelings. It is also very useful for re-imagining images and layouts quickly
  2. ChatGBT is my AI colleague, and I experiment with how it translates philosophical ideas, and the metadata from imagery, into abstraction.
  3. DaVinci Resolve is used to build the VFX animations of the relationships between the other two
     

Because it is digital, the work can be any size, but because the ideas I work with are big, powerful and strong; the work needs to be as well.  

Digital art can be inherently sustainable because nothing needs to be produced until someone wants to put it on their wall.  Projection led naturally to VFX and film, playing with how images can morph one to another.

Regarding her Research Process…

Action Research became Alana’s research methodology of choice, during her doctoral work at Columbia University in 2000, primarily because of its participatory flexibility in structure.  Life is messy,  frequently and the stages of the research overlap.
 
Alana says:
“All research methodology inherently measures the past, and this is a problem for situations where people want to build something new. Because of the rounds of research cycles, Action Research (which has been called by many names) measures situations closer to when they happen and this allows participants to plan and execute for a new future, measuring the steps of evolution as it emerges.”

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