________

Sorika is pleased to announce a new publication, Ali And All The Kids Aka Ali Ice-Cream, bringing together photographs by Ali Dunn, documenting life within Britain’s 'New Age' travelling communities from the mid-1980s onwards. The title reflects the names by which Ali is still known within the community, of which she remains an active part, where prefixes, nicknames and adopted names are used in place of surnames and conventional forms of identification. An intimate record of friendship, family, movement and collective life, the photographs capture children growing up on the road, improvised homes, gatherings, festivals, free parties and protests. Rather than presenting the community from the outside, Dunn’s photographs come from within it — made by someone who was living the life she was photographing. The term “New Age Traveller” was largely a name applied to the community by the media; Dunn identifies simply as a traveller. 

Dunn first encountered the travelling community as a teenager through television coverage, including the hostile political and media rhetoric surrounding travellers during the Thatcher era. What was presented as a threat to conventional society instead fuelled her curiosity and attraction to a way of life built around freedom, independence and collective living. She soon left conventional society behind and became part of the travelling community herself. Her photographs span the years following the Battle of the Beanfield, the emergence of the free-party and rave scene, Castlemorton, Glastonbury and travelling across Britain and Europe. Children are at the heart of the archive: Dunn’s own five children alongside the many children of the wider community, growing up collectively and surrounded by nature, music and movement. The photographs are less a constructed art project than the by-product of a life lived — a family archive that remained largely unseen for many years, kept in suitcases and, until recently, stored beneath her bed. What emerges is a deeply personal portrait of a way of living built around autonomy, friendship, care and resistance.

The photographs are included in Earthly Paradise: Radical Living in the UK, a touring museum exhibition exploring alternative forms of living and social organisation in Britain. Dunn is a neighbour and friend of artist and publisher Gareth McConnell, whose relationship with Ali and engagement with the archive has helped bring the work to wider institutional attention. The publication offers an intimate encounter with Dunn’s photographs and the people who inhabit them: a document of a way of life that has largely disappeared, but whose values of freedom, community, care and resistance continue to resonate. Published by Sorika on the occasion of Earthly Paradise: Radical Living in the UK, 03 October 2026 - 28 March 2027, William Morris Gallery, London.

_________