Louise Ashcroft

Louise Ashcroft

Louise Ashcroft makes video, performance, audio, animations, watercolours and objects; humorously chronicling antagonistic fieldwork which critically intervenes in sites of late capitalism, such as trade fairs, shopping centres and her own biology.

Louise Ashcroft’s antagonistic fieldwork in public spaces meddles with the bizarre norms of colonial capitalism; shopping backwards by smuggling uncategorised vegetables into supermarkets, mailing former public space to its overseas investor owners, perfuming statues, and eating the bank of England very slowly by grinding it up and adding it to meals. Her interventions are chronicled as videos, animations, performances, audio, images and objects. She’s made work for BBC Sounds, Tate Learning, Museum of London Lates, Arebyte, Bobinska Brownlee, Frans Hals Museum, Art Night London, BQ Berlin, Turf Projects, Duckie, Deptford X Special Project, Salisbury Art Centre, Coastal Currents Festival, TEDx Hackney, Wellcome Lates, Latitude and Supernormal Festival. She is a co-founder of London’s peer led art school AltMFA (est 2010), runs the funny live art nights ‘Unperforming’ and ‘Seamonsters’, and teaches BA FIne Art at Goldsmiths University. Speaking fiction to power, Louise’s work creates situations and stories which unravel reality and remix primary and secondary research; often deliberately misunderstanding or subverting cultural codes and disrupting systems in order to speculate alternative ways of seeing/being.

Uplands: Utopia I.O.U

HD Video / 21:31 min / 2021

Join Krankie, Gellax, Shiny and Schrodinger's Oscillator, for a dark, trash-pop tale of suspected murder, fabricated from physical and mental detritus found around the warehouses. A pandemic fever-dream spawned from artist Louise Ashcroft's daily loiterings on an industrial estate in the London regeneration area of Blackhorse Road, which is bordered by ancient marshes, modern apartments, fly tipping and expensive coffee. A leaky landfill of trends, topped up with Louise's own macabre neurotoxins, to create an aggressively cathartic animated poem which pokes at all our capitalist neuroses: productivity, overwhelm, loneliness and excess. A tragi-comic, end-times 'apocalypso', laced with its maker's ADHD diagnosis, unhealthy levels of iron-brew-flavoured beer and soap suds.

Dead Relevant

HD Video / 27:58 min / 2020

Meme-riddled film about the life of Nic, a character in a 17th Century Frans Hals painting, who is turned into a jpeg and uploaded onto the internet where he seeks relevance as an influencer, beardpreneur and biotech artist who tries to share his privilege in dodgy ways. Commissioned by Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem in 2020 for their Image Power exhibition.

Unicorns of Westfield

HD Video / 05:36 min / 2017

Film-poem made by the artist occupying a London-based 'Westfield'-branded shopping centre for six months as part of a residency with Arebyte Gallery. Fieldwork noticing and psycho-analysing her surroundings. She also led mythological personal shopper tours for the public.