MEMBER SPOTLIGHT | Rachel Bride Ashton | Society of Scottish Artists

The Society of Scottish Artists is home to a diverse and dynamic community of artists. To showcase the work of our members, we’ve launched a monthly member spotlight, where one SSA Member is chosen at random to be featured on our website and social media. This month, we are excited to highlight Graduate Member, Rachel Bride Ashton.

Rachel Bride Ashton is a Scottish multi-disciplinary artist, who was born in Dumfries in 1976, has earned her living as a freelance painter since 1996 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.

Rachel Bride Ashton’s practice is intuitive and often research led. This process leads to drawing, painting, sculpture or installations, which generate fantastical characters, scenarios and organic fictions.

She makes work which celebrates the 90% non-human part of us, our microbiome, crucially formed at birth. She uses a language of intuitively extracted and abstracted symbols from multiple sources, to bring attention to unseen connections and symbiotic interactions. Intertwining personal histories and cosmologies with ecological and feminist body politics, she oscillates between moods both comically dark and ‘deviantly’ joyful.

Read more about Rachel and view her work on her Profile Page>>

To be in with a chance of being featured in our monthly Member Spotlights, you must:

Have an active SSA Membership (Student, Graduate, Artist or Professional)
Have at least 3 images uploaded to your SSA artist page, including a main profile image.
Have an artist statement and link to your website or social media included on your SSA profile page.

If you are unsure how to complete your profile, there is a step by step video guide in the Members Area of our website, along with a whole host of other great resources!