Jamie Ashforth

Jamie Ashforth is a multidisciplinary Canadian artist materializing connection through participatory and environmentally-engaged artmaking. Her work experiments with how we gather, trusts embodied ways of knowing, and explores the shared space of ritual. Jamie holds an MA in Art and Process from MTU Crawford College of Art and Design and a BFA from Concordia University (Canada). She has exhibited across Canada and Ireland, including The Lord Mayor’s Pavilion and Art Gallery of Northumberland. Her artist residencies include Struts Gallery (Canada), Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre (Ireland), and KH Messen (Norway). The Queens of the Fjord and Groundswell/ Groundswell Again are international projects bridging geographic distances. She has received funding from the Arts Council of Ireland and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Statement

Fuelled by nomadic tendencies, I research how we build and adapt a sense of place and belonging within shifting landscapes. My practice is rooted in experimental, process-led, and material-responsive encounters with the unexpected. Environmental elements such as water, wind, gravity, moisture, light, sound, temperature, and fire are aspects of this work because they evoke embodied registers. Photography, text, found objects, and foraged debris index these fleeting encounters. In an era of ecological, economic, cultural, and geopolitical destabilization, I see artmaking as a way to repair broken webs of kinship and address experiences of belonginglessness by cultivating and concretizing relational experiences. As such, I initiate durational installations and transatlantic interactions to forge new ways of connecting. I see these participatory-projects as tools: to navigate precarity, to build resilience, to materialize knowledge, and to create ripple effects impacting collective and individual identities. My leading curiosity lies in the shared space of ritual in relationship to landscape, where the ‘invitation’ itself is a cornerstone of this work.