is an American artist and author based in London, where she serves as Chair of the Visual Arts Society at the Reform Club on Pall Mall. Working across painting, drawing, and found objects, her practice remains responsive to materials that spark and shape her creative process. Her writing spans poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction.

As I approached my interview with Dallas Athent, it began to soften into something more conversational and more transformative than I had anticipated. Our meeting on a Parisian terrace opened with a man carrying a speaker arriving in the square, gathering strangers into an impromptu dance. We watched, and spoke, as people abandoned their intended plans for the evening, surrendering instead to spontaneity and the simple pull of joy. This moment set the tone for everything that followed.

As we spoke, the structure of an “interview” quickly dissolved. Our conversation moved fluidly through questions, analogies, and storytelling, unfolding into something more expansive. Inevitably, we found ourselves returning to art and the forces that shape it.

Questions about the art world were often met with analogy and inquiry, turning back toward what is individual within it. Dallas spoke about the role of chance and intentionality in her career, offering an image that stayed with me. She described a scene from the movie Titanic, where the ship is sinking and the heavy doors of the boiler room begin to close. In that moment, a man narrowly escapes, his feet disappearing just as the doors shut behind him. Dallas saw herself in that image, in the many moments where she moved forward through a combination of luck and timing. Moving abroad, securing residency, continuing her artistic path, each step often came just in time.

Yet these moments of chance are only part of the story. She emphasized the work required to arrive at those thresholds in the first place. To board the ship, even one that may be sinking, is still to move forward. Progress does not always come in clear or stable forms, but in choosing a direction and stepping toward it. Finding a vessel, however imperfect, carries you closer to where you hope to be.

Through this perspective, the idea of a fixed future begins to dissolve. “The goalpost is always moving.” Life often resists rigid planning, and approaching it instead as an ongoing experiment, grounded in effort but open to change, becomes far more generative. To plan too tightly is to risk losing the ability to respond with play or to adapt to what emerges. When you chase so-called success which compromises your voice “you risk a life of making work for others with no reward.”

Dallas’s own experiments often move beyond the confines of the studio. In response to a creative stagnation rooted in studio-bound practice, she was encouraged to step back into the world. For her, art is a way of speaking with and about lived experience, and immersion in that experience is essential. When artists become too removed, the work can lose its connection.

She returned to early moments that first shaped her understanding of art, recalling visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City as a child. At seven years old, she was struck by how real everything felt. In contrast, spaces like Disneyland began to register as attempts to replicate that same sense of immersion. This reflection led her back into public and lived spaces as sites of creation. Whether seated in a museum or on a park bench, she turns to her sketchbook, making blind contour drawings and color studies as a way of reconnecting.

We spoke about the distinctions between high and low art, and how value is assigned or withheld. Returning to what Dallas describes as the basics becomes a way of dissolving those hierarchies. Expression, in any form, holds weight when it sustains the individual’s creative impulse, when it keeps something alive.

Following one’s own desires allows for a more authentic trajectory, and with it, the possibility of carving something new. Reflecting on artists we admire, such as Tracey Emin, it becomes clear that their paths are not shaped by trends or market demands, but by a commitment to their own voice. As Dallas noted, no one person’s trajectory can serve as a guidebook for another. Each definition of success is personal and cannot be borrowed or imposed.

She left me with a question that continues to resonate: how do you want to spend the majority of your time?

GRACE SHIVELY is an American artist based in Paris who works across multiple mediums, with drawing at the core of her practice. She engages a personal archive to revisit formative moments and reconsider how identity takes shape over time.