Rachel Bride Ashton

Solo Exhibition at the Federation Gallery, supported by Creative Scotland, in the Keiller Centre, Dundee from the 5th August until the 23rd September 2023.

Opening Times: Wednesday 12-4, Thursday & Friday 10-4, Saturday 12-4

Rachel Bride Ashton is a Scottish multi-disciplinary artist and mother who earned her living as a self-taught painter before returning to education in 2019 where her practice expanded into performance, sculpture, sound, film and installation. She is the recipient of the Freelands Painting Prize 2022 and won the Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) Award, the Generator Projects Prize and the James Guthrie Orchar Prize for her first-class undergraduate degree show installation at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in 2022.

Rachel lives on an off-grid croft with extended family, which has engendered an interest in beneficial bacteria and its sources: separation compost toilets, wild fermentation, natural and empowered birth, intuitive health practices, regenerative gardening, symbiotic relationships in nature, rewilding the female body and edible and medicinal plants.

Like Donna Haraway, she believes that the only way to live ‘on a vulnerable planet that is not yet murdered’ is through ‘multispecies alliance, across the killing divisions of nature, culture, and technology and of organism, language, and machine.’ Consequently, Rachel’s process stems from constant inner dialogues concerning how to limit her material impact by using predominantly salvaged, sustainable and compostable materials.

This exhibition explores our relationship with the wild, whether that be our inner or outer worlds. It envisions our re-animalisation, blurring the lines between where we stop and the land begins, moving away from the fetishizing of nature as seperate. Shapes overflow from the edges of objects much like the microscopic creatures which spill over our edges. Representations of mycelial and bacterial information pathways suffuse everything as women morph into flora or fauna, fresh or composting, elemental and fruity. Personal histories and cosmologies leak through and combine with ecological and feminist body politics,creating characters who, like ‘Warm Data’ offer fresh perspectives on our complex and often confusing relationships with our bodies and all the other life forms with which we share them. The deviant-beast-woman, the monstrous feminine, is worshipped as the orgasmic, seeping, goddess. Like Baubo, the Vulvanic Goddess of Obsenity or an ancient Sheela-Na-Gig.