“This was the first time I had created a piece of work with an awareness that there were expectations from other people, and I feel that my art practice was pushed in a very different direction than I originally anticipated. It was the first time I publicly spoke about the ideas underpinning a piece of work and found this experience to be very confidence building. Since the event I have started to work on compiling a collection of theoretical essays as this is an area I would like to explore further.” – Laurien Ash, 2015.
Platform is an annual award designed to nurture new artistic talent by selecting and exhibiting work from art school graduates from the south east of England, providing support through the critical period between graduation and life as a professional artist.
Laurien Ash (Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford), creates work that is concerned with the intersection between human experience and technology. Ash created virtual worlds and narratives for the viewer to explore using familiar tools such as a mouse or a screen. It is through these interactions, the ways in which we control technologies, that Ash attempts to disrupt both our understanding of what we are seeing and the level of control that we have over it. The mouse appears not to work, the video disrupted, drawing the viewer deeper into the digital world.
Ash is hosting a talk on Thursday 3 September, for more information and to book your place, please click here.
Download the Platform exhibition guide here: Platform Exhibition Guide
Artist Statement
But would you actually want to be a JPEG file?
I work to embody my patterns of perception in digital space. Mapping myself in the coded movement of video game topography: I exist as event, structured like an interlaced tetris trap.
I use digital space to accumulate objects and patterns around myself, they cluster like empty shells washed up by the tide, flowers at a roadside crash, a landfill site: both consumed by the space and contribute to creating it, they make visible my edges through exposing its shape.
Trap: By creating patterns of signification, I construct the world as an extension of my mind exactly in the attempt to escape it; the more I pull outwards to externalise this narration of myself as subject, the more the whole space becomes me.
Hide from this optical structuring not by blocking out the light, but by becoming it: become the place where things are put.
(Yes.)
Download the Platform exhibition guide here: Platform Exhibition Guide
