Summer AiR | Ashley Hemmings

Ashley Hemmings

Ashley Hemmings is a visual artist and gallery worker from Newfoundland and Labrador. She is currently based in Windsor, Ontario where she is working towards her MFA at the University of Windsor. Ashley completed her BFA in Visual Art from Grenfell Campus, Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her research-based art practise has led her to partner with environmental scientists, cognitive psychologists, and horticulturalists, to consider the intersection of many different ways of looking at and interacting with the natural world. Ashley has worked at a number of art galleries across Newfoundland including Eastern Edge Gallery, The Grenfell Art Gallery, and The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery. Currently she works as a Research Assistant to Dr. Jennifer Willet and the Incubator Art Lab at the University of Windsor.

During this residency, Ashley Hemmings intends to continue work on her current text-based rug hooking project. The rugs that she is making represent an analysis of municipal and colloquial language used to describe and dictate interactions between humans and their environments. They are also a decontextualization of these forms of language, considering how the meaning of a directive or phrase changes when presented through a domestic craft medium, as opposed to an authoritative government sign. Her goals are to continue to work on rugs that are already planned, as well as begin an interactive research project with the community. She would like to speak with the public to see if they/ their families have any of their own strange place-specific sayings relating to how they as people interact with the land they inhabit. Hemmings wants to take these phrases into consideration, potentially creating smaller rugs to add to the series that can be given back to her collaborators and photographed in locations that have \ importance to people other than just herself and her family.