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.
