Alison Britton’s first significant solo exhibition was at the Crafts Council Gallery in 1979. She was one of the 14 selectors for The Maker’s Eye at the same gallery in 1982. She curated a British Ceramics exhibition for the British Council in 1985, which toured three venues in Czechoslovakia, and in the same year Peter Dormer curated Fast Forward: New Directions in British Ceramics for the ICA, London. Alison Britton participated in The Vessel at Serpentine Gallery, London, in 1987, and the British Council exhibition Contemporary British Crafts at the National Museum of Modern Art in both Tokyo and Kyoto, Japan. Her retrospective curated by Tanya Harrod for the Aberystwyth Arts Centre toured UK museums from 1990–92 and culminated at Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Holland.

With Martina Margetts, Alison curated The Raw and the Cooked in 1993 for the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, which toured to the Barbican Art Gallery, Taiwan Museum, Swansea, Shigaraki Museum Japan and Musée d’Art Contemporain de Dunkerque. In 1995 Alison Britton’s exhibition Form and Fiction was at the Marianne Heller gallery in Heidelberg, Germany, and in 1996 a solo show toured venues in Australia including the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney and the Brisbane City Art Gallery. In 2001 she was shortlisted for the UK Jerwood Prize. In 2005 she participated in a large international survey exhibition, Transformations, The Language of Craft, at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, from which works were acquired for the permanent collection.

Alison Britton has had regular solo exhibitions at Barrett Marsden Gallery, London, since 1998. Of these, the 2003 show New Ceramics stands out as a pivotal development in the progress of her work, and also in 2005 New Work and the Ed Wolf Collection of Alison Britton Pots, the exhibition of a private collection of over 70 of her pots acquired over 30 years. A limited-edition catalogue of the collection was published by the gallery. In Containing, 2007, Alison Britton curated a collection of nineteenth century Modernist and contemporary chairs, and showed her work in this context on a shelf running round the gallery walls.

In 2007 she helped to initiate and participated in END, an international collaboration between seven ceramic artists from England, Norway and Denmark. Their work was shown at the Danish Museum of Art and Design, Copenhagen, and the Bomuldsfabriken in Norway.

In 2009 Alison Britton developed the collaboration with the Norwegian artist of the END group, Marit Tingleff, and shared Unforeseen Events, a dual exhibition, at the renamed Marsden Woo Gallery. Also in 2009 she curated Three by One: A Selection from Three Public Craft Collections by Alison Britton for the Crafts Study Centre, UCA Farnham. A catalogue of six essays edited by Alison and Simon Olding was published by the Crafts Council in partnership with CSC.

In 2010 Alison Britton was invited to be a guest artist at Shigaraki Cultural Ceramic Park, Shigaraki, Japan, and delivered a lecture on Hans Coper and his influence on Contemporary British Ceramics at the Shigaraki Museum, which was hosting the first touring retrospective exhibition of Coper’s work in Japan.

Alison Britton is currently making a body of new work for a solo exhibition at Marsden Woo Gallery London in February 2012. There will be two kinds of pieces: a group in her normal buff clay, and a group in red clay. This will provoke different approaches to surface.