Jamie Ashforth
Grey Zone: Architectures of Transition
3 October to 20 December 2023
Studio open to visitors Monday, Tuesday, Friday, Saturday
Open Studio & Artists Talk Saturday 16 December, 12 noon to 4.30 pm
Please join us in celebrating the close of Jamie Ashforth’s artist residency with us! 12-2pm Open Studio, 2-3pm Artist Talk, 3-4:30pm Wine + Cheese
She has lots to share with you all about the genesis and evolution of Speaking to Absence, a project in progress throughout her 3-month residency here at Uillinn.
Looking forward to seeing you here!

This experimental drawing and print-based project involves in-person engagement running alongside remote participation. You're invited to bring an object of your choice to Studio 3, where all further instruction and materials will be available. If you're joining in remotely, *here* is your step-by-step invitation. You can also watch the process here: https://youtube.com/shorts/xWEJnT3vueY?si=jDo7PbRek1TfsYNZ

Jamie will use this studio residency as a period of research and development, where she intends to transform the studio space into a site of collaborative experimentation. Given widespread encounters with environmental, social, and individual change, Jamie is interested in creating a middle space – a grey zone – that makes room for shared vulnerability, uncertainty and confusion. Her intension is to build an unexpected and unplannable environment to explore the way in which installation construction may offer shared, embodied exposure to experiences of precarity and liminality. This process will likely involve combining foraged and scavenged materials from the Skibbereen area with previous portfolio work, sound recordings and contributions from others. Through durational, collaborative, mixed media inputs, the installation will continually evolve throughout the course of the residency. Themes of absence/presence, emptiness/ fullness, silence/noise, and stillness/movement will key into a broader exploration of transitional spaces and relationship to environment. A focus will be placed on documenting the evolution of the studio-installation space and inviting others into the conversation.

Jamie acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for funding this residency.

Jamie Ashforth is a Canadian visual artist researching the relationship between place and material, with a focus on vulnerability, precarity and experimentation. Her practice is largely process-led and material-responsive out of a quest for embodied experiences of discovery. Through experimental approaches to drawing, print, photography, and installation, she engages with transitional phases and liminal spaces. Jamie is a current In-House 2 artist-in-residence at The Guesthouse Project (Cork), and a member of international collective Re:Group. While previously in residence at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, she hosted Groundswell Again, a synchronised transatlantic event generating kinship across distance.

Instagram: @jamie_ashforth
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jamie.ashforth.1/

https://www.jamieashforth.com/new/

Jamie Ashforth
Kinship Across Distance
2 April to 30 June 2022
Studio 3

Open Studio + Groundswell Again Public Screening Event, June 30, 2022
11am – 4pm - Open Studio: Studio 3
6:30 – 8pm - Open Studio + Pre-Public Screening Gathering: Studio 3
10.30 pm - 11.30 pm - Groundswell Again Image Premier: images will be projected onto the exterior of Uillinn, facing Main St. and premiere live online on YouTube here.

As a Canadian-born West Cork-based visual artist, Jamie is motivated to generate kinship across distance through socially and environmentally engaged art making.

Over the course of this three-month residency, Jamie will continue ongoing explorations of place, belonging and environment by mapping interactions with local landscapes and communities through embodied experiences of discovery. By lying down in wild spaces or foraging elements from those landscapes for studio use, she will reimagine ways of being in relationship with one another and the environment. Experimental approaches to drawing, printmaking, sound, photography, and installation will archive aspects of this process, alongside participatory, event-based work. Direct contact with the land is an integral aspect of these explorations, which are performative and improvisational by nature.

Jamie’s practice is process-led and material-responsive where she works outside of her comfort zone charting a new course. In new territory, she intentionally positions herself in unknown circumstances to experience the physical impact of surprise. Jamie sees touch as a form of navigation through this continual process of reorientation: a dialogue between the senses, thought, emotion, and physical sensation. By inviting viewers into the work, she cultivates active participation in this conversation and initiates new ways of connecting across multiple time zones. Blurring the line between near-far, interior-exterior, and individual-collective, she aims to disrupts how the spaces we inhabit impact us sensorially. This serves to map the liminal nature of place and belonging.

Groundswell Again - June 11, 2022, 3pm GMT +1 (10am EST/ 4pm CET), Various Locations Internationally

Jamie invites the public to join Groundswell Again, a transatlantic event bridging the distance between Ireland and other countries. Motivated by the belief that creative community building is an antidote to wide-spread isolation, participants will unite through a simple, synchronized act: lying flat on our backs in a wild space within diverse localities.

This is an opportunity to stop, look, and feel ourselves in direct contact while imagining the cache of other people doing the very same thing at the very same time in a number of countries around the world. The power of this act of vulnerability is that may open a new space to feel the relationship with our surroundings, and one another. Everyone involved, far and wide, is invited to photograph their experience and then send it to info@jamieashforth.com
1. Prep for outdoor weather
2. Find a wild space/forest
3. Lay down
4. Stay down for 10+ mins
5. Photograph your view
6. Send the image to Jamie the same day

Members of the public will be encouraged to initiate their own calls for participation to diversify global involvement, and foster collaboration. Where possible, community members in-and-around Skibbereen are encouraged to meet in person locally. The photo-archive of the event will be shared publicly as a way for participants to locate themselves within the broader network of participation. This outdoor image projection will run 11pm on June 30, 2022, at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre.

This is the second iteration of Groundswell. The event first took place in October 2021 in which 72 people across 8 countries in 5 time zones lay down outdoors at the same moment. This new phase aims to increase the number of people involved, diversify geographical locations, and incorporate accessible ways for those involved to view each other's contributions. This series is an exploration of embodied practices, the event as artwork, and experimental participatory art making.

Jamie Ashforth holds an MA in Art + Process from Crawford College of Art and Design, Cork City, Ireland, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University, Montréal, Canada. She is a member of Sample Studios and Visual Artists Ireland. Jamie has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions including Drift/Land at Earl Selkirk Gallery, Toronto (2019), Plus/Minus, Crawford College of Art and Design, Cork City (2021), and Thaw, Gallery Asna, Clonakilty (2022). Her experiences as artist in residence include Struts Gallery (Sackville, Canada), Working Artist Studios (Ballydehob), Road Books (Inniscarra), Cill Rialaig (Ballinskelligs).  She will be participating in the Skibbereen Arts Festival with artist-led initiative, Re:Group, later this year.

@jamie_ashforth
www.jamieashforth.com

WCAC acknowledges the financial support of the Arts Council and Cork County Council in making these residencies possible.