Chat with Louise Ashcroft
Louise Ashcroft and I talk about tourist yoga and embracing liveness as a strategy in this new less socially intense space of lockdown. Louise talks about faking liveness, walking tutorials and collage as walking - wandering the things she's wondering. We talk about sculpture jokes, pace and making things structurally unsafe so that things can come together unexpectedly. We talk about starting with writing, post it notes, expensive words and extending language. We discuss getting bored quickly, Frans Hals, and how to change the accent of a slogan. Louise gets into how art and comedy overlap, boring talks and using the argos catalogue and a residency in a shopping centre to build a narrative of what's really going on. We talk about joy and rage, about generosity and resistance and freedom as a muscle to be flexed. We talk about education, or as Louise calls it, 'utopia', about Alt MFA, making your own art school and working with and within an institution. Louise 'demonstrates' improvisation live(!) and takes us around the back of Asda, through her head and into ours. We end on cycling to ET and being perfectly primed to make something out of nothing.
Image:
GNIPPOHS (Backwards Shopping) an interactive performance at disORDER live art festival, 2020. Image: Antonis Maros.
Links:
Website: www.louiseashcroft.org
Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtO4g5E_v_MMpGuz2DOt7wA
Instagram: @louiseashcroft1
You can see her new film 'Dead Relevant' at Frans Hal Museum:
https://www.franshalsmuseum.nl/en/event/exhibition-image-power/
open 1st june - 20th Sept, (1.5m distance between visitors)
and some works she's made in her kitchen for Open Space Contemporary a few weeks ago:
https://www.openspacecontemporary.com/projects/kitchen-takeover/kitchens-hell-by-louise-ashcroft/
plus her new BBC Boring talk which is a humorous, personal story about breakfast cereals, identity and colonial capitalism:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08c014g