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ARTIST STATEMENT
There is potential for disconnection when trying to turn your head inside out and present it in a way that feels beautiful for others.
My work interrogates and challenges societal understandings of temporality and the motivations of biological processes. Incorporating backgrounds in film, sound, animation, design, object-making, and theatre performance, I create installation-based work situated under the umbrella of time, gesture, and performance, emphasized by visual and auditory experiences. I see my installations as living spaces—resonant, feeling, reactive—where the act of perception becomes an unfolding dialogue between presence/recognition/bias/stimulus. By integrating sensory experiences that envelop and reorient, I devise portals of awareness, where viewers can experience the inexorability of time, the echoes of history, and the fluidity of identity. My work is an ongoing negotiation between what is seen, heard, and felt, inviting environments where the many may question and reimagine their own positions within the world.
I work with a variety of mediums and research practices because they bring me closer to the complexities of everyday life. I make art to make sense of the world around me, especially questions of existence, temporality, and the importance of change over time. Time dances on the farthest edges of both immensity and desolation. I have spent stretches of time asking people, texts, and experiments to define time in a way that I can understand and stand with.
Through these methods, the work of Catherine Ashley explores what it means to be a maker informed by the world in/outside of oneself.