Interview With Aliomalley For HEYGIRL Magazine

“Just some illustrations, based on nothing and no one”

Meet digital illustrator Boo Bruce-Smith - AKA Aliomalley. We chat about her tongue-in-cheek treatment of politics and dating, forsaking the tyranny of the algorithm for real life networking, and how her most popular fuckboi illustration has only ever been bought by men…

Words: Rowena Price for HEYGIRL Magazine | Issue 6 // Spring 23

[Abridged extract from full article]

Rewind to early 2022 and Boo Bruce-Smith is living the Parisian dream – almost. Living with great flatmates, in a secure job looking after kids for a lovely family / barista-ing, soaking up post-lockdown city life, filling her boots with cheese and red wine. What’s not to love? 

Good question.

She says she did love it – she was “fully in love with it”, in fact. But a global winter of discontent and a bad period of depression had left her sold on the scenario yet searching for something different. Namely, the career she didn’t know she wanted.

Bruce-Smith had been in France for most of the pandemic by this stage, developing her wry illustration work under the radar, with the ‘I’m not sure this is really a thing’ attitude of someone who didn’t study art, didn’t have any connections in the art world either side of the English Channel, and doesn’t come from a family of artists. But what started as a uni-years hobby and creative outlet (she studied Politics at Newcastle University) had quietly become a lightning rod for her energy, ideas and sense of purpose. And something shifted.

Fast forward to early 2023 and she’s about to celebrate the first full year of her artist alter ego Aliomalley being a proper ‘thing’, with a bunch of exhibitions and brand collabs with the likes of Soho House under her belt, and the fire and focus of someone who’s on a roll and finding fulfilment in their work. The alter ego is now a fully fledged business.

The art itself started off with a sparse, line drawn, sad-girl aesthetic – pared-down black and white New Yorker style illustrations accompanied by pithy one liners. It’s since developed into something more zany and fulsome – think the droll sophistication of New Yorker cartoons meets the colourful wit and economy of David Shrigley meets the unmistakable ethics and aesthetics of somebody born after 1995. The tagline on the Aliomalley website describes it as “just some illustrations based on nothing and no one” – an ironically self-deprecating take on what she does and where she finds inspiration and, as such, very on brand. 

In reality, it’s a response to what she notices in the lives and loves of her friends and family, as well as her own experiences and wider observations of pop culture and society at large. She describes it as “50% political, 50% basic bitch” and we briefly head off on a tangential epiphany, citing the popular podcast The High Low (by millennial pop culture icons Dolly Alderton and Pandora Sykes) as a possible unconscious reference point, checking the middle class white woman privilege caveats along the way.

Like all good satirical art, it’s rooted in reality but amplified, and delivered with a laconic light touch. The tallest of orders if you don’t possess the knack (although she clearly does), but even harder to strike comedic illustrative gold if you’re creating in a second language (French, in this case) with a zeitgeisty slang lexicon of its own and other cultural nuances to navigate.

On the decision to leave Paris to make a go of her art, she says: “By that point I realised that Aliomalley was what I wanted to do. I knew I was in a headspace where I could do it, and I realised I needed (and wanted) to move back to London. Anything was going to be easier than trying to do Aliomalley not in my first language.”

She acknowledges that she was fortunate to have a ready-made emotional and practical support system back in London in the shape of her three sisters, who were already house sharing in South London when she moved back. She credits them with being essential to the development of Aliomalley when she went full time with it in March 2022, helping her navigate the shark infested waters of social media (one sister works in content creation) and doubling up as models for the apparel lines she’s now producing. “We’ve been navigating it all together”, she says, “free-falling through it and figuring it out as we go along”. 

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Read the full interview at heygirlmagazine.com

Photography by Simon Clemenger // Overlaid illustrations by Aliomalley