AMY ASH

Almost Body I, II & III 2022

graphite on wall and digital photographs (taken by Annie France Noël)

In the photographs, I pose wearing garments made in collaboration during the AlmostBody art lab, while the drawings on the wall depict of the same objects.

Each of the objects rendered and worn were made in the collaborative Almost Body workshop with Big Brothers & Big Sisters, which focused on touch in the wake of the pandemic. Participants created imaginative gadgets and costumes to get them through the present and into a speculative future that centred on caring for the body out of celebration rather than caring for the body out of fear.

Each piece was made by a team—a “big sister” and a “little sister” who, during the isolation over the course of the pandemic, have been periodically unable to meet because they are not in single household bubbles. My hand drawings of the objects are directly on the wall, while the key concept for each team’s creation is written below. Even the squishy flooring is there to engage the body differently.

I wear the collaborative creations is an absurd act of solidarity to bring their speculative future into fruition.

“Amy Ash’s installation AlmostBody (2022), conceptualized in a workshop that explored touch and connection amid the pandemic, features photographs and illustrations of handmade costumes. Notably, there is a cape adorned with cloth hands, and what Ash refers to as “a soft armour” made from tulle and artificial flowers. The tender pieces propose a future, beyond the reach of pandemic alienation, where care and community will preside over fear and isolation.”

Excerpt from review, fait-main/ handmade—Amy Ash, Marjolaine Bourgeois, Andera Jane Cornell, Zoe Fortier, Alli Gator, Jacinthe Loranger, by Christiana Myers for Cmag (2022) Full text

Special thank you to Amelia and Lisa, Vickie (Wancen) and Nicole, Ella and Natasha for your trust and collaboration in making this project.

AlmostBody borrows its title from Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, a source of inspiration within the context of my research surrounding non-hierarchical art pedagogies, embodied/experiential learning, and collaboration.

This installation was part of Fait Main | Handmade, curated by Alisa Arsenault for Galerie d’Art Louise & Reuben Cohen, at the Université du Moncton.

Documentation imagery by Mathieu Léger.

THANK YOU:

Alisa Arsenault, Nisk Imbault, Angel Cormier, Annie France Noël, and Big Brothers and Big Sisters Moncton, and Galerie Sans Nom.

I would like to acknowledge, with gratitude, the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

2020-21

Mettle uses copper as both a key material in the work and allegory—its material qualities becoming symbolic of resilience. Copper is a super-conductor of electricity, and the standard by which all other conductivity is measured. Within my practice it has become a conductor of meaning. Copper is a memory shape alloy. It will always ‘remember’ its original form, and, when pressurized, will invariably revert to its original shape. Copper is also within our biological make-up, closely linked to memory dysfunction. When threatened by the elements, copper will produce a patina, or verdigris. This greenish tarnish acts as a weather buffer to preserve the integrity of the copper below its surface—an exquisite coping mechanism. By adding copper sulphate crystals both to the metal’s surface and the paint’s pigment, the crystals continue to grow and morph as they respond to the climate, a metaphor for personal transformation brought on by external forces.

This work was supported by the New Brunswick Arts Board.

THANK YOU: ArtsNB & Saint John Arts Centre

PHOTOS: Naomi Peters

TideBody(feeling real) 2021

TideBody(feeling real) from the series, Touching Visions, was first exhibited in solo exhibition, Different Layers of the Same Water, at the Saint John Arts Centre, in 2021. It was also included in Currents (2021), curated by Jennifer Stead for the Andrew and Laura McCain Art Gallery, in Florenceville-Bristol, and later shown at UNB Art Centre, in Fredericton, in their group exhibition Reflections (2023), curated by Marie Maltais.

TideBody(feeling real) is an exploration of the body's memory and vital entanglements with other human and more-than-human bodies.

The gentle movement of the silk as a person walks by the sculpture is indicative of the impacts we have on one another and the world around us. TideBody(feeling real) nods to the resonance of water to highlight our shared responsibility, and connectivity, to the wider ecosystems we inhabit, while reminding us, also, of the inevitability of natural cycles, like the tides. This work hopes to emphasize possibility by blurring lines between self and other, body and land/water, experience and memory, matters and states.

Could highlighting the interconnections and overlaps between us spark a collective duty of care for one another and the world to which we belong?

Silk, heirloom textile dye, plaster, copper, 2021

6'x2'x1' with slight variability

Learnscapes is an ongoing exploration of the instances of belonging, wonder, and growth, that occur through experiential learning, particularly in a group setting.

Imagery from this series is rooted in photographic documentation of participants (with permission) in my workshops throughout the years.

2016

A series of work which came out of tangential research associated with the Pot of Gold project. The works consist of fragmented imagery from the Moirs chocolate factory, in Halifax, layered over found snapshot images from the same time and place.

(photographic image transfers, gouache, St Armand paper)

2015

A collection of irregular handmade paper comprised of pulped abaca & found photographs (also pulped). This work was made during the Truth, Lies and Lore thematic residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Likewise, this work was made possible with support from the Banff Centre for the Arts and the Peter MacKendrick Endowment Fund for Visual Artists. This work was recently shown in Haunt, a Third Space Gallery exhibition curated by Christiana Myers.

Paper has been used to record and archive our truths (and our fabrications) for centuries. It is a surface designed to absorb histories, a tool for communication, to keep record; a document. We know paper as the technology rather than the message. A blank page normally acts as space filling, content separation or place saving.

I am regularly presented with offerings of abandoned mementos. While living in London, UK, I took a summer trip home to Saint John. There, while stopping by a local second-hand shop, I was gifted a vintage Moirs (a now defunct Halifax based chocolatier) box, full of mid-twentieth century negatives and news clippings from Saint John. This type of gift had been a common arrangement between us before I’d moved away. The shopkeeper explained that the box was basically worthless. Even so, unaware that I had moved away, he’d kept it for nearly a year until I returned from across the Atlantic to accept it.

I think of these types of gifts, boxes brimming with unknown people, reversed images and mementos which no longer trigger the memory they were once intended to as objects of misunderstood value. Items which have been kept/collected/found with no clear value and perhaps no clear purpose; and yet, we cannot bring ourselves to throw them away. I sometimes feel as though I am fulfilling some duty by relieving people of the weight of hanging onto them.

The process of making paper by hand is laborious. It involves the entire body. By choosing to pulp these found images I am both destroying and preserving—giving them a new function, a new space to linger. All the while, the act of making the paper—one sheet at a time—repeats itself into a ritual, the memory of which exists in my physiology, even if I can’t remember the individual images which make up each page.

Tracing Paper is part of a larger body of work (Pot of Gold) which includes silver gelatin prints, cyanotypes, drawing, collage, installation and text.

THANK YOU:

Banff Centre for the Arts and the Peter MacKendrick Endowment Fund for Visual Artists, Loyalist City Coin and Books in Saint John, Third Space Gallery & Christiana Myers.

(each sheet approx 11x17 inch)

2017

ongoing projects

(the sum of the pieces)

2014

This project begins with a collection of found photographs depicting an area geographical near the area I call home. Dealing with the impact of landscape within the construction of personal cosmology, this work negotiates distance, nostalgia and separation anxiety.

Ordinary Monuments: Love on the Rocks features images of the Hopewell Rocks, an iconic New Brunswick landmark, through various stages of the 20th century, paired with a snapshot of an anonymous woman in prayer pose. 

A small wall installation, Love On the Rocks includes two photographic transfers onto graph paper, stitched together and hung alongside three original photographs of the Hopewell Rocks. 

approx 30x60 inches

This piece was included in studio Stiwdio Maelor’s juried exhibition, In Motion, Wales, 2015.

2017

Interfering with fragments of communication, now disjointed and one-sided, I daydream my way home through my hands. Layering ghostly images reflecting my own imaginings & associations over familiar scenes, I attempt to participate in foreign conversations.

Found postcards depicting scenes in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, cyanotype, collage.

Postcards from Home was first exhibited at Below65 Gallery in Maidstone, Kent, UK. 

Thank you Ali Farmer & Below65 Gallery.

2016

“Something deeply hidden had to be behind things."

Albert Einstein

COSMIC HEARSAY is a playful nod to a faith in the power of the unknown (whatever your unknown may be); it is an ode to wonder in the face of all things uncertain and it is a reminder that the both knowledge and the unknown are fanciful and fluid.

COSMIC HEARSAY is a series of ink and watercolour drawings, combining photographic transfers and graphite, on St.Armand paper.

2015

This work uses found imagery and histories from several sources, connecting the fragments, to string together new associations. Without words, what are facts? makes reference to Susan Howe’s poetic docu-essay Sorting Facts, or Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker.

Cyanotypes from found negatives on acrylic paint, with hand stitching.

Each piece approx: 8.5x11.5 inch

2015

Rewriting the Almanac, is from a larger body called, Fox Farm Work, and was included in Working Title, an exhibition curated by Christiana Myers, in January 2015. Rewriting the Almanac is the fragmented chronicle of a farming family from New Brunswick, and the reconstruction of their abandoned legacy.

“Amy Ash’s wall installation, Rewriting the Almanac focuses on the role of sentimentality in the collective memory as it is constructed and passed on. Ash acquired a collection of photographs and negatives of what is believed to be the Hoar family fox farm in Albert County, New Brunswick. Interested in constructed meaning, Ash filled gaps in the research by generating her own narratives. She reprinted negatives; delicately tracing some photos with embroidery and then sewing them together loosely in order to delineate connections both real and fabricated. The piece reads as a threadbare family quilt, inviting viewers to stitch together their own narratives"

Christiana Myers, Curator, Working Title

view catalogue

found photographs, photographic transfers, silver gelatin prints from found negatives, hand stitching.

approx 30x60 inches

2010-2011

Re-Collect is a body of work that stems from abandonment and situates itself in the shadows between the collective memory, false memories and sentimentality. With tendencies towards embellishment, Re-collect is not only a tribute to the forgotten, but also a prompt to question one’s own attachments.  

Re-Collect is about the spaces in between, and the shaky connections that bridge them into tangible objects.

Re-Collect was exhibited at Ingrid Mueller Art and Concepts in Fredericton, N.B., Canada, in 2011.

graphite drawings, acrylic and oil paint, shellac, and resin on paper/board/canvas with hand stitching.

sizes vary