Event overview
The Department of Art Public Talks Programme Autumn 2017 welcomes artist Louise Ashcroft
Louise Ashcroft creates speculative situations with the aim of making alternative realities imaginable and therefore possible. For example, playing Retail Therapy games with Westfield shoppers using products as props; doing housework with strangers in their homes while planning hypothetical lives together; writing fan fiction about a Canary Wharf worker whose ID card she found; or performing stand-up about her failures to overthrow capitalism through interventions like smuggling a ‘foreign’ vegetable into Tesco. Ashcroft uses humour to antagonize power structures and resist passive acceptance of social norms by shifting and repurposing the materials and systems she encounters in ordinary spaces. Whether experienced live or through her retellings in many forms (sculpture, video, comedy, sign-painting, rap, PowerPoint), Ashcroft’s subversive antics bring out the surrealism inherent in the status quo in order to question its authority.
Louise Ashcroft grew up in West Yorkshire, and Cardiff. She studied Fine Art at The Ruskin, Oxford University, before moving to London where she worked as an art fabricator while doing an evening MA course in Cultural Studies at Birkbeck. After running the arts charity Departure Foundation for several years she studied sculpture at the Royal College of Art. In 2010 she co-founded of the free art school AltMFA. Louise has exhibited widely including at Arebyte, arebyteLASER, Artsadmin, Coastal Currents Festival, Westminster Waste, The Koppel Project, The Government Art Collection, Exeter Phoenix, AVU Prague, Latitude Festival, Guest Projects, Turner Contemporary, ArtLicks Weekend, The Boring Conference and The Function Room. She was recently Family Artist in Residence at Camden Arts Centre and Tate Schools Artist in Residence. Ashcroft teaches at Goldsmiths and UCA and runs Chisenhale Studios’ Into the Wild Programme.
Image: ‘Shopping Research’, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.
This event is free. No booking is required. All welcome.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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18 Oct 2017 | 5:30pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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