No more furniture

About

Edwina Ashton's videos, performances and drawings create oblique and absurd concoctions of character and narrative. They explore the allure and peculiarity of eccentricity and idiosyncrasy, often through the use of insects, animals and peculiar creatures given human attributes to ridicule the perversity and tragedy embedded in polite behaviour and the rules that govern social interaction.

Over the past year, Ashton has been extending her practice into new territories, creating animated films of her drawings and a major participatory carnival performance.

Her first exhibition at WORKS|PROJECTS will feature another new departure ' sculptures that give permanent form to the distinctive physical vocabulary found in the costumes and props of her films and performances.

Against an enveloping wall painting that sits somewhere between rough fresco and theatrical backdrop, a menagerie of peculiar characters sit amongst a collection of second-hand furniture. Odd creatures resembling brightly coloured gnats the size of small dogs with sink plunger proboscises wearing Roman gladiator helmets or old ladies lacey capes ignore human size insects engaged in obsessively mundane activity, who in turn ignore each other.

Ashton's signature drawings and fragments of handwritten prose, sensitive and savage by turns, permeate the installation, drawn directly onto the painted backdrop around the characters, scratched into the furniture like school days vandalism or tacked to the walls like notes left by the mute inhabitants in an attempt to give themselves voice. A voice that talks of an existence that is both delicate and demented in equal measure.