Details

First Name	Rachel Bride
Last Name	Ashton
Username	rachel-bride-ashton
Website	rachelbrideashton.com
Region	Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire
Disciplines	Ceramics, Drawing, Film, Moving Image, Painting, Performance, Printmaking, Sculpture, Sound
Themes	Abstract, Botanical, Environment, Figurative, Identity, Landscape, Political, Narratives

Statement

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.

Rachel’s constant inner dialogues concerning how to honour a ‘multispecies alliance’, helps her explore our relationship with the wild, whether that be inner or outer environments. Making work which envisions a re-animalisation of both us and our environs, representations of mycelial information pathways suffuse everything as women morph into flora or fauna, fresh or composting, elemental and fruity. Rachel blurs the lines between where we stop and the land begins, moving away from the fetishising of nature and challenging the problematic nature of the word ‘Green’.

Biography

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.

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. She has just had a book published on this subject titled ‘Invisible and Deviant Mothers – Childbirth in Visual Culture’ and is also to be included in an edited collection, Push: Childbirth in Global Screen Culture, published by Manchester Metropolitan University.

Recent residencies include the Scottish Sculpture Workshop, supported by VACMA, Lumsden and Porthmeor Studios supported by Freelands Foundation, St Ives in 2023, and previously a year-long digital residency, April 2017 – May 2018, Walking Without Walls, with May Murad at Deveron Projects, Huntly.

Recent solo exhibitions in 2023 include Warm Data, Wet Heap at the Federation Gallery, Keiller Centre, Dundee and The All-Forgiving Greenness at WASPS Inverness Creative Academy. Current and recent group exhibitions include The Society of Scottish Artists 125th Annual Exhibition, The MacLaurin Gallery, Ayr, TheNet Gallery, London – Freelands Painting Prize, Glasgow Society East – Old Contemporaries, the Botanic Gardens, Dundee – To Be Nodal and the Kirkcudbright Galleries – Wasps X Kirkcudbright Exhibition.