Sharon Kathleen Alston

Alston's watercolor piece My Bloody Hand (1979) was included in A Women's Picture Book (1988), which compiled the works of 25 female artists from New Zealand. Alston's art installations Frolicking in the Valleys of Death and Ironical Journey were exhibited in the 1981 New Zealand Women's Gallery.

Sharon Alston worked at the magazine Broadsheet, a monthly feminist magazine founded by four women, Anne Else, Sandra Coney, Rosemary Ronald, and Kitty Wishart in 1972. She would work at Broadsheet from 1973 until the early 1990s, designing the magazine covers, providing illustrations for articles, making comic strips, and creating various posters and flyers. Alston's most famous piece was My Bloody Hand, a watercolor painting produced in 1979 about the processes of menstruation and lesbian sex. This work, which aimed to make menstruation and lesbian sexuality more visible, was featured in A Women's Picture Book, a 1988 collection of feminist women's art. She used the metaphor of a bloody hand to explore the sensual and emotional qualities of lesbian identity, confronting aspects of New Zealand culture which enforced safe, hetero-normative ideals. My Bloody Hand was included in the book despite pushback from anthropologist and writer Irihapeti Ramsden as well as other female Māori contributors due to the piece's potential breaking of tapu. Some of Alston's other works included the installations Frolicking in the Valleys of Death and Ironical Journey, which were exhibited in the 1981 Women's Gallery in New Zealand. These focused on themes separate from her identity as a lesbian artist. Frolicking in the Valleys of Death depicted sheep in patterns on fields of grass and across the New Zealand flag, while Ironical Journey was a quickly assembled structure composed of iron. While Frolicking in the Valleys of Death was received as a commentary on the days in which the New Zealand flag is officially flown by the government, Ironical Journey was a more unserious piece, built for the sole purpose of being destroyed.

Alston made significant contributions to feminist activist movements in New Zealand. She was among the first people to sign up for Auckland's Gay Liberation Front, an activist movement started in 1972 to advocate for gay and lesbian rights in New Zealand. The movement was inspired by the young lesbian student Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, who mobilized a crowd of 40 people to declare the beginning of their movement in front of the press. In a 1973 speech before a delegation of women's liberation members, Alston openly announced she was a lesbian and advocated for the rights of lesbians worldwide. This speech would be published in the June issue of Broadsheet later that year, within a section labelled 'Gay Pride.' In 1976, Alston advocated for women's bodily autonomy when dealing with issues surrounding abortion.

Alston came out in her teens as a lesbian to supportive parents. However, she spent a large portion of her early life in the closet to others outside of her family. Despite being part of Auckland's Gay Liberation Front, most of her work did not engage with her lesbian identity. Her most famous work My Bloody Hand was an outlier, which aimed to explore her lesbian sexuality. Alston found a life partner in Robbie Champtaloup. Alston was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 45 in 1994 and passed away in early 1995. At the end of her life, Alston felt she was not as well known as she would have liked.