About
Post Baccalaureate Graduate 2010
Ashley is the artist educator at Durham Community School in Durham, Maine where she teaches young artists in Pre-k through 8th grade. She lives in South Portland with her husband and two children. Her art practice has evolved since her time as an undergraduate photography major and she now enjoys a wide range of art making. You can see a glimpse inside her classroom by following along at @artwithms_s.
Gallery
Artist Statement
Our identities ebb and flow. Some parts get pulled forward and others pushed back. I continually return to that notion and how my identity and experiences have changed as the result of becoming a mother—driving me to create work that becomes a record of my experiences.
As a wife, a mother, an educator and many other things, I feel a need to create work that legitimizes me and helps me to see myself in my own life. So much about the roles I inhabit focus on taking care of others and putting their needs first. Through this course, I was challenged to begin a more consistent art practice and it got me thinking about what kind of art making would feel meaningful for me now, as I am often the last person on my priority list.
This work is a look at myself post-postpartum. When my daughter Scout turned 4, I hit an existential wall and thought,
What is this phase of my life? Why do I feel confused and anxious? What is this strange sense of grief?
I felt a strong need to get pregnant again, not just because I knew I wanted another child, but because I knew what that experience would feel like and who I was in it. I didn’t know who I was in this new post-postpartum role—past the rollercoaster of having the child and raising them through their most dependent years.
My two pieces are both paper-cuts based on photographs of myself and my son, Quigley. They are titled One Day, an image of him and I on his first day, and One Year, based on a photograph of us shortly after he turned one this July. Working with paper-cuts allows me to utilize my previous background in photography with a new approach of reducing the image to simple shadow and highlights rendered in only black and white.
Quigley was born last summer during the pandemic, and it was a much different experience than with my daughter 5 years earlier. I was pregnant when COVID came, when George Floyd was murdered, and when the election was in full swing. I am pretty sure Quigley floated in a bubble of cortisol instead of amniotic fluid during his last few months in utero. I was so relieved when he finally came, but there was a heaviness there, and a much different fear than with my first birth. I felt so much had changed, or come to light, in the world I had just ushered him into. I felt fear. I felt guilt.
During this course we reflected a lot on our roles and identities and how they intersect with our identities as artists and educators. At the beginning of the course, we were asked to share an image of an artwork that felt particularly meaningful to us now. I shared the painting Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia) by Alice Neel. There are so many things I love about this piece, but what really resonates with me is the expression and body language of Nancy, the mother. She looks overwhelmed, intimidated, yet still loving. I chose to recreate aspects of Neel’s painting in my second paper-cut.
It is important to me that if I create work about myself and motherhood, that I do so in a way that is authentic and honest while celebrating the fact that these are my unique experiences. I want to see myself in them, so that they are not lost. So that I am not lost as well.