Rachel Bride Ashton

Ceramics
Mixed media
Painting & Drawing
Performance
Printmaking
Sculpture
Video
Visual Arts

Artists Statement

My practice is intuitive and often research-led. I might begin with reading about gut health and antibiotic resistance, followed by automatic writing then spoken word recording. This research process then leads to installations comprising drawing, painting and sculpture which generate fantastical characters, scenarios and organic fictions. I use a language of intuitively extracted and abstracted symbols from multiple sources, to bring attention to unseen connections and symbiotic interactions. I intertwine personal histories and cosmologies with ecological and feminist body politics, oscillating between moods both comically dark and ‘deviantly’ joyful.

My process stems from constant inner dialogues concerning how to honour a ‘multispecies alliance’, focusing on limiting my own material impact on an already overburdened planet. Painting is at the core of my practice. I explore our relationship with the wild, whether that be inner or outer environments. I focus on re-wilding but not in a way which separates the human from nature, city from countryside. I make work which envisions a re-animalisation of both us and our environs, blurring the lines between where we stop and the land begins, moving away from the fetishising of nature.

Biography

Rachel Bride Ashton is a Scottish multi-disciplinary artist, feminist and researcher who was born in Dumfries in 1976 and has lived off-grid in Aberdeenshire since 2007. She is interested in depth psychology, body politics, the microbiome, sustainable building and gardening, foraging and plant medicine as an integrated holistic lifestyle. Rachel considers this and her research and practice to be entirely interconnected.

She returned to formal education in Dundee in 2019 and is the recipient of the Freelands Painting Prize 2022. She graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design with a first-class honours degree in 2022 and won the Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) Award, Generator Projects Prize and the James Guthrie Orchar Prize for her degree show installation which featured female empowered birth practices, separation compost toilets and good bacteria.

Upcoming residencies include: Freelands Foundation at Porthmeor Studios, St Ives, Cornwall in June 2023, and a Group Residency at Scottish Sculpture Workshop, Lumsden also in 2023, and previously a year-long digital residency, April 2017 – May 2018, Walking Without Walls, with May Murad at Deveron Projects, Huntly.

She has a upcoming solo exhibitions at Wasps ICA in April/May 2023 and the Federation Gallery, Keiller Centre, Dundee, in July and August 2023, and recent group exhibitions in 2022 include the Net Gallery, London – Freelands Painting Prize and 2022, Botanic Gardens, Dundee – To Be Nodal.