Claire Ashley

Full Professor, Adj: Painting & Drawing, Contemporary Practices (2000). BA, 1993, Grays School of Art, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland; MFA, 1995, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Scottish born, Chicago-based artist Claire Ashley mines the language of painterly abstraction, monumental sculpture, and slapstick humor to investigate inflatables as painting, sculpture, installation, and performance costume.

These works have been exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries, museums, site-specific installations, performances, and collaborations such as the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, UK; Beacon Arts Center, Scotland; the Louis Kahn Library at Phillips Exeter Academy, NH; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AR; and the Chicago Cultural Center, IL, among many others. Her work has been featured on blogs such as Studio International, VICE, Hyperallergic, and Artforum, and in magazines such as Sculpture Magazine, Art Papers, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Time Out Chicago, Yorkshire Post, and Condé Nast Traveller (European).

Ashley received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL), and her BFA from Gray’s School of Art (Aberdeen, Scotland). Currently, she teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Department of Contemporary Practices, and the Department of Painting and Drawing. She lives in the cornfields of Illinois with her old husband, and a menagerie of pets. Her three offspring have flown the coop.

Full bio can be found at: https://clairehelenashley.com/about

Henry Moore Institute (Leeds, England), Millennium Park Chicago (IL), Studio Pavilion at the House for an Art Lover (Glasgow, Scotland), Sarasota Art Museum (Sarasota, FL), Louis Kahn Library and Phillips Exeter Academy (Exeter, NH), Shelburne Museum (Stowe, VT), School of the Art Institute of Chicago (IL), Oolite Arts (Miami, FL), NONSTNDRD (Sauget, IL), Lubeznik Center for the Arts (Michigan City, IN), Balloon Museum (Paris, France and Milan, Italy), Rock University Art Gallery (Rockford, IL), Terrain Biennial (Oak Park, IL), Cultivator Arts (Bray Grove Farm, Morris, IL), Epiphany Center for the Arts (Chicago, IL), Raft of Sanity (Buffalo, NY), Johalla Projects/Print+Object (Chicago, IL), Beacon Art Centre (Greenock, Scotland), Weinberg Newton Gallery (Chicago, IL), Grand Valley State University Gallery (Allendale, MI), Governors State University Gallery (University Park, IL), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Boulder, CO), Art Basel (Kassel, Germany), Rockelmann & Partner (Berlin, Germany), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), Laumeier Sculpture Park (St. Louis, MO), Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville (FL), Boston Children’s Museum (Boston, MA), 808 Gallery, Boston University (Boston, MA), University of Buffalo Galleries (Buffalo, NY), Southern Georgia University Gallery (Savannah, GA), Elmhurst Art Museum (Elmhurst, IL), Illinois State University Galleries (Normal, IL), Anya Tish Gallery (Houston, TX), The Tetley Center for Contemporary Art (Leeds, England), CAFKA Biennial of Art in Public Places (Kitchener, ON, CAN), Indiana State Museum (Indianapolis, IN), Cleve Carney Gallery, College of Du Page (Glen Ellyn, IL), Milwaukee Art Museum (Milwaukee, IL), Young World (Detroit, MI), DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (Lincoln, MA), Helen Day Art Center (Stowe, VT), Disjecta Contemporary Art Center (Portland, OR), Columbus College of Art and Design (Columbus, OH), ICEBOX Crane Arts (Philadelphia, PA), Bedford Gallery (Walnut Creek, CA), Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center (Austin, TX), Art Gallery of Mississauga (Mississauga, ON, CAN), The Chicago Cultural Center (Chicago, IL), The Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, IL), The House for an Art Lover (Glasgow, Scotland), gallerA1 (Edinburgh, Scotland), and The Highland Institute for Contemporary Art (Inverness, Scotland).

My work seeks to explode the possibilities for painting. I want to push against its immense history, to use its essential power (color, surface, mark, image) to infiltrate other media/material to create hybrids, to procreate without reserve, and in some mangled Darwinian way continue to exist forcefully in the universe, even if its existence is more like something out of an absurdist play like Ionesco’s The Rhinoceros.

I work with inflatable sculpture as the surface for painting to live and breathe, becoming a tattooed skin of sorts on a kind of hybrid body. These sculptural paintings also become performance costume and once kinetic, lumber through the landscape on 12 sets of legs. I find the inflatable form compelling, as it exists in two states—both as flaccid skin and taught volume—metaphors for our bodily processes: inhaling/exhaling; taught/wrinkled skin; flaccid/erect organs etc. These self-portraits take up space. They make their presence felt. They vibrate with raunchy, energetic life—being lumpy, imperfect, and real.

I use a phenomenological version of painting, as a form of embodiment rather than representation. I am interested in using the physicality and imperfections in the surface of each form where color and shape get conflated. The painted marks camouflage the form, often in ways that make each more incongruous. Color complicates the shape by altering our perceptual understanding of it, no matter if that palette is a more subtle aerated gradient or a more aggressive graffiti/tattoo-like spray paint application.

I think of color as linked to the visceral physicality of the body, rather than only a visual experience; it is an interconnected system. Color is an animal instinct that grows out of our ancient, pre-historic genetic coding for survival. Bright colors create a deeply ingrained alert in the body; whether assessing danger or pleasure, we know we have to pause and pay attention. So, I use that aggressive pay-attention-to-me physicality as both warning and persuasion in my work.

I utilize color, scale, and space as a feminist tactic to be as loud and obnoxious as I can in the world, upending assumptions of beauty, elegance, grace, and taste. Embellishments, adornments, and attachments sometimes populate these lumpy, bumpy, body-positive forms, accentuating erogenous zones and g-spot protrusions to evoke piercings, body-armor, or chain-mail. These blinged-up power houses are ready to stand up to those that want to control the bodies of others, and compete with the macho male sculptors of art history, but in a way that is soft, squishy, and playful rather than hard, severe, and unforgiving.

The miniature objects and works on paper I create operate as anthropological clues to my larger inflatable beasts. They are scatological traces and grafted skin samples from their bodies. The works on paper are crumpled, folded, creased, cut, and torn, before being painted, drawn on, sprayed, and marked up, holding a trace of their creation in stasis. The miniatures are variously sewn and stuffed, cast in Ziploc bags, 3D modelled and printed, cut and carved with the residue of the body in mind. However, similar to the monumental work, color is employed with acrid bioluminescence, evoking deep sea creatures, prehistoric beasts, alien beings, and future versions of us, in addition to the current Homosapien.

One of the most important points of accessibility in my work is humor. I want it to be up front and personal so the things I make laugh at myself in absurd and incongruous ways. I use humor, empathy, and play as a foil for the monumental sculptural scale and expressive abstract painted and patterned surfaces.

My work gathers momentum from the moment and folds in influences from my life, such as the experience of raising my three kids. Work and life seem to evolve in parallel: from bounce houses, soft toys, and cartoons; to sci-fi, rock-climbing, dating, and dancing; things keep pace with one another. I am excited and humbled to see the next generation of humans (including my own offspring) taking up arms with pride, confidence, vigor, and beautiful attitude. This positivity is inspiring.

The urgency of the world's environmental outcome is present too, both in my guilt of using spray paint and plastic-coated fabrics to make the inflatable armatures, and my experiments to make organic paints and bioplastics as potential new material. The work becomes a kind of rolling stone, gathering clues of its pathway through the world on its hide. I’ve been collecting plastics from my recycling bin, gathering dirt and plant matter on dog walks around my new home in the cornfields of Illinois, making homemade bioplastics in my studio, and experimenting with seaweed from my home in Scotland, with a view to using them as a myriad of clues on the bodies of my Anthropocene-like forms. They are maximal conglomerations of the world rather than minimal singularities.

Additional time-based relationships to painting are often employed in my work too. Timers, gif animations, video projections, and performances activate the inflatable form directly. The forms age, needing to be washed, repaired with patches, repainted as the color cracks through use (constant folding and movement), etc. The ephemerality of the objects becomes another metaphor for the body’s aging process, its fragility and vulnerability, and in that realization, its urgent call for attention and demand to be seen.

Mobility and portability are important considerations in my work, both functionally and conceptually. I like to take advantage of the possibilities of scale shifts as the work moves from packed cube to expansive room-filling amoebic sculpture. Conceptually I want these fine art objects to move through the world in an extremely democratic, middle-class way: packed in a suitcase and flown with the artist, or boxed up and shipped via UPS.

I believe art has work to do out in the world, so I tend to show at a wide variety of venues, ranging from street festivals and storefront spaces, to free cultural centers and university galleries, in addition to museum venues. I am interested in creating democratic access to my work by utilizing a deliberately egalitarian and generous collection of humorous, visceral, and empathetic connections between the viewer and the object, and formal entry points for multiple communities to engage with the work. The audience is an active participant in the exhibitions and performances I produce. They push against the forms, touch their surfaces, laugh at their incongruity, and sometimes enter into or dance within the forms themselves. In short, they complete the work.

As mentioned above, I believe painting responds to the zeitgeist. Some examples of this in my work happen when I look for moments where figurative body-scape (human, animal, and alien) and landscape (land, sea, and outer-space) meet. I want people to recall the sense of wonder when looking at natural phenomena like mountains and clouds, or human inventions like the Macy’s Day parade, or the Pillsbury Dough Boy, but that they also sense something else in the experience. Something that rides the line between a tongue-in-cheek reference to Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam and Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

These inspirations also get entangled with other curiosities that run the gamut from the Aurora Borealis, Lee Bontecou, Star Trek, Sam Gilliam, expandable foam, Nikki De St Phalle, bioluminescent organisms, the Bee Gees, politics, Robert Rauschenberg, coral reefs, Elizabeth Murray, animal camouflage, Jessica Stockholder, cake frosting, SpongeBob Squarepants, feminism, Howardena Pindell, lumpy bodies, tattoos, Oscar Oiwa, rock formations, Dr. Who, jellyfish, Peeps candy, laser tag, San Kim, fluorescent yellow, UFO sightings, abortion rights, neon pink, Olga Diego, spinnaker sails, graffiti, Kraftwerk and Daft Punk, hot air balloons, Karina Smigla Bobinski, bubblegum, Ant Farm, and more ….

One final thing to note here is that I deliberately expand the physical materials of painting. I use PVC coated canvas tarpaulin, Tyvek, and Ripstop nylon because they are cheaper than traditional fine art materials, and when you work at the scale I do, you really have to take cost into consideration. On another level, I use readily available materials because I want the philosophical underpinnings of my work (democratic access) to be embodied by the material itself. So, using PVC coated canvas tarpaulin (the material house painters use to protect floors), Rust-Oleum and Montana spray paint, duct tape, kids’ backpacks, and personal blower fans, becomes one way to do that. On a third level, I am interested in the magical, transformative alchemy that happens when these relatively unconnected, and very mundane materials are brought together to make my particular version of painting. I link my material choices to both a desire to connect with multiple communities whether art-trained or not, and to an implicit critique of the elitist nature of some sections of the art world (its intellect, its excess, its imbalance, etc.) which is also a reflection of a more global critique of power and authority. However, I also use it because the PVC coated canvas holds air particularly well, and the paint sits on the surface in a very satisfying way, to create ecstatically colorful, monumentally cartoonish, and uncanny sculptural paintings. 

Vimeo

Ruddy Udder Dance, 2012. Sculptural performance project with The Happy Collaborationists (Meredith Weber and Anna Trier) at ACRE in Steuben, WI. August 18, 2012. Ten ACRE resident artists/performers/dancers: Oli Rodriguez, Steven Frost, Joseph Belknap, Sarah Belknap, Will, Aiden SImon, Susie Kimball, Abinadi Meza, Andrew, Etta Sandry. Many thanks also to Nick, Emily, Bob and Rosa at ACRE for all their incredible generosity. Inflatable sculpture: Spray paint, PVC coated canvas tarpaulin, fan.

Augmented Chicago: Inaugural Realities, Millennium Park Chicago, Claire Ashley with audioscape by Joshua Patterson, N O M A D I C F L U O R A T I C P H Y L O S I A N S P A W N, 2024. 

More information about Ashley at clairehelenashley.com.