Ashley Hemmings
MFA Visual Arts
Ashley Hemmings is a visual artist and gallery worker currently based in St. John’s, Newfoundland. She completed her BFA in Visual Art at Memorial University of Newfoundland in 2018, and an MFA in Visual Art at the University of Windsor in 2021. Her practice asks questions about the relationships between humans and the natural world, and draws attention to the exponentially bizarre ways that land and public space are regulated but not protected. Using play and humour as methodology, Ashley’s practice combines locally rooted craft processes with other media such as video, installation, digital drawing, bioart, and collecting. Ashley has worked at a number of art galleries and artist-run-centres including Eastern Edge Gallery, The Grenfell Art Gallery, The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery, and INCUBATOR Art Lab.
To view more of Ashley's work visit: ashleyhemmings.ca
My MFA thesis work, titled Tell Me How to Be Here, uses rug hooking to consider the multitude of ways that language influences our relationships with our environments. Specifically, my handmade hooked rugs compare and contrast texts collected from public municipal signage and my grandmother’s idioms leftover from her youth growing up on Nova Scotia farmland. With this work I am asking: How can signs be viewed as cultural utterances when considered alongside my grandmother’s phrases? And how do the messages behind both forms of language change when removed from their original contexts and represented through a domestic craft medium? Tell Me How to Be Here also considers material questions that pertain to craft processes as acts of political interventions, and the establishment of craft as a vehicle for the matrilineal transfer of knowledge. It is through the combination of these ideas, that this project has grown from a critical analysis of public signage, into an exploration of my family history with craft, and an archiving of information passed down to me from my grandmother.