ARTIST STATEMENT
Ashe is a multidisciplinary artist based on unceded Dja Dja Wurrung Country (Bendigo, Australia) working across performance, photography and installation. Their practice explores how bodies are positioned within social and institutional systems, often drawing on national symbols, architectural structures and acts of physical endurance. Through staged actions and installation-based works, Ashe examines the relationship between the individual body and the social frameworks that contain it, with a particular focus on belonging, vulnerability and exposure.
Ashe completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Photography) at Sydney College of the Arts and a Master of Contemporary Art with distinction at the Victorian College of the Arts. Their practice moves between live and mediated forms, with performance functioning as both an embodied action and a generative process for photographic and sculptural outcomes. Attention is given to gesture, duration and the physical conditions of making, with materials and actions often functioning as quiet tests of duration and presence.
Much of Ashe’s work features barriers that demand to be challenged or confronted.
Ashe has presented solo exhibitions at Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA), Contemporary Art Tasmania, Blindside, Kings ARI, BUS Projects and VOID_Melbourne. Their work has been included in exhibitions at Parliament House Australia, the Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh), HOTA, Campbelltown Arts Centre, The Substation, Araluen Arts Centre and SYRUP Contemporary (Sydney), as well as internationally at Lehrter Siebzehn and tête (Berlin) and Enjoy Public Art Gallery (Wellington). Their work is held in the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of Ballarat.
They have received support from Creative Australia and Regional Arts Victoria and were awarded the Ian Potter Cultural Trust Emerging Artist Grant and the NGV Women’s Association Award. They have been a finalist in major awards including the Bowness Photography Prize, the Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award, the Incinerator Art Award: Art for Social Change, and the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award. Residencies include Picture Berlin, Laughing Waters and the La Trobe Art Institute