BIO
Jamie Ashforth is a Canadian visual artist exploring new forms of connection through socially and environmentally engaged art making. Her experimental approaches to drawing, print, photography, and installation explore embodied experiences of transition. Participatory, event-based practice is an emergent part of how she unpacks the relationship between what is temporal and tactile, and ways of generating kinship across distance.
Jamie holds an MA in Art and Process from MTU Crawford College of Art and Design, Cork City, Ireland, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University, Montréal, Canada. She has exhibited in several exhibitions including Hard Twist 10 – Memory, Gladstone Hotel (Toronto, CA), Drift/Land, Earl Selkirk Gallery (Toronto, CA), Fragments in Constellation (Skibbereen, IE), and Drawing Connections, The Lord Mayor’s Pavillion (Cork City, IE). In 2021 and 2022, she initiated Groundswell and Groundswell Again, public events synchronising global participation. From 2011 to 2019, Jamie worked as a Scenic Artist in Toronto’s film and television industry, informing her use of installation and material appropriation. Her experiences as artist in residence include Struts Gallery (Sackville, CA), Cill Rialaig (Ballinskelligs, IE), and Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre (Skibbereen, IE). She received funding from the Arts Council of Ireland and was shortlisted for the 2022 RDS Visual Art Award. Jamie is a current Inhouse 2 artist-in-residence at The Guesthouse Project (Cork, IE) and a member of Sample-Studios (Cork, IE) and Visual Arts Ireland.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Fueled by nomadic tendencies, I am currently researching how we build and adapt a sense of place and belonging within shifting landscapes. My practice is largely process-led and material-responsive and quite intentionally and somewhat resistantly, I often encounter the unexpected. Motivated to reconcile my relationship with what is uncontrollable and uncertain, I build multi-media durational installations involving changeable circumstances. Elements such as wind, gravity, moisture, light, sound, and fire are aspects of this process and reflect how integral it is for me to work in direct response to my environment. Through adaptation and response, I find that a performativity of materials emerges. I’ve recently moved away from a solitary studio practice toward experimental, event-based work that is open to collaborative engagement. Given widespread encounters with ecological, social, and individual change, I’m interested in creating an in between space – a grey zone – that makes room for shared vulnerability, blurriness, and confusion. Inviting others into the installation, these architectures of transition expose us to what is liminal and the process of reorienting within flux.
Departure/Juncture, Fragments in Constellation, Skibbereen, Ireland, 2022 (Image by Tomasz Madajczak)
