OLIVE ASHFORD

My artistic practice is primarily driven by a deep-rooted interest in materiality and the process of making, whilst the content of my work draws influence from the built environment. Most recently I have been digitally exploring urban landscapes, extracting elements from the virtual world and experimenting with ways of communicating them in material form. These elements include warped perspective, the wrapping of images around three-dimensional objects, interior and exterior viewpoints, false surfaces and the notion of non-places. Moving between physical and digital states allows me to explore the relationship between two and three dimensions; in particular, questioning what happens when a solid object is flattened and re-extruded.

Sculpture, painting, drawing and printmaking are not only techniques for creating resolved pieces of work, but also for navigating and digesting ideas. The physical act of making within my practice often serves as a game of Chinese Whispers, whereby visual material is distorted as it passes from one medium to the next. I start with an image, the image is manipulated onscreen, screen printed onto fabric, which is then wrapped around an object – and so on. At each stage the image moves further from itself. This reiterative process results in an outcome that is neither representational of the original nor fully abstract, but rather something that traverses the fault line between the two. I position my work in the interstices between opposing things – flatness and three-dimensionality, figuration and abstraction, rationality and absurdity, the digital and the real. I find fascination in these uncertain, nuanced states of the in-between.