Louise Ashcroft performed “Unlucky Dip” on Southeastern trains between Hastings & St Leonards, 2017
BIOG
I react spontaneously to the world around me, exploring and questioning the situations and environments I encounter; collecting and re-contextualising found materials, creating narratives through objects, and making sculptural interventions. My work is an ongoing process of re-coding physical and cultural space to create an ever-changing vapour-trail of ideas, actions and artefacts. Stay wild. Trojan horseplay. Run on your own and run with the pack. Radical inclusivity. Love aliens, hate alienation. Radical accessibility. The group is a form of drag (let others set you free from yourself). The establishment can’t catch you – shift shape whenever they get too close. Cuckoo to mistletoe to crocodile-bird. Learn from diverse organisms living in close association. Overshare. You are one in ten billion (and that’s just the number of organisms disco dancing in a handful of ashes). Optimistic nihilism. Anarcho-comedy. Laughtivism. Disguise yourself as something familiar but be careful not to recreate the state you left behind. Make sure your name is omni-barrelled and you change it every day. Recognising the power of small acts of resistance, I wander through the world noticing, collecting, subverting and adding things to the environments I encounter. Through this process I create situations and stories, which are re-presented as comedy performances, writing, video, sculpture, radio and participatory experiences. A conceptual magpie, I notice the details of how the world works and adjust them in order to subtly reprogramme the everyday and make alternative ways of living together imaginable. I mostly intervene in urban environments or ephemera through playful direct actions, to conjure speculative realities. Humour is my chosen philosophical process because it can condense several possibilities into one idea, thereby flipping the familiar and protecting us from passivity or polarisation, by provoking the need for active, complex interpretation. Here’s a statement an audience wrote for me. Born in Bradford, West Yorkshire. Lives and works in London. Louise graduated from the Ruskin School of Art (Oxford University) and Birkbeck (University of London). She also studied Sculpture at The Royal College of Art and is co-founder of the alternative art school AltMFA.
