Ashley Eriksmoen
For two decades, my practice has been centred on the gaps, tensions, and overlaps between manmade and natural environments, the domains of that which was built versus that which has grown. My conceptual concerns arise from existential questions regarding humans’ capacity and need to feel connected to their environments, be it their living room or their planet. American novelist Toni Morrison once posed the question, "How do we meet the world and connect to our personal spaces?" And I would add, “How do we take care of each other and the world if we don’t first feel connected?”
My work looks at the connection between people and the world mediated through relationships to objects, and how objects can bridge the divide; I combine and re-present familiar objects and creatures to make those links. Many of my works utilize devices such as slight asymmetry and visual tension to imply animate posture and gesture in furniture forms. My work also addresses issues of sustainability, natural resources, consumerism, and waste, and most recently the inherent violence that arises from delineation and desensitization regarding the world and others. Of late, my material and process choices have further referenced the embedded life-cycles of objects, appropriating found shapes of salvaged furniture to return discarded artefacts of consumerism to a neo-natural state. I am interested in re-wilding the modernist interior, challenging Cartesian notions of order, utility, and the planned universe.
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