Louise Ashcroft

Humorously anarchic stories about disrupting social norms and power structures, often as performance/video/animation

Staff details

Louise Ashcroft

Position

Lecturer in Art

Department

Art

Email

L.Ashcroft (@gold.ac.uk)

Goldsmiths Research Centres/Groups

Centre for Art and Ecology

Louise’s performances, videos, animations and installations chronicle her playfully disruptive sociological investigations into places like shopping centres, waste tips, trade fairs, internet spaces, the AI industry, strangers’ homes, museums, protests, medical care, and the street. By directly challenging the rules and logic of such contexts through her interventions and analyses, she questions the bizarre norms of late capitalism and catalyses new myths; frequently bringing the viewer along as a co-conspirator through interactive workshops and experimental experiences which rethink business as usual for the sake of ecology, equality and (cathartic, critical) comedy. Her recent film What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting tracks Louise’s personal journey to non-parenthood, and the accompanying project ‘No Kids Nursery Rhymes’ condenses a survey of 180 childless/childfree people’s perspectives into an album of playful, rhyming songs.

Academic qualifications

  • MA Cultural and Critical Studies, Birkbeck, University of London 2008
  • BFA Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford 2004

Research interests

Interests include: Comedy, radical education, hackathons and ethical hacking, marketing, design, the internet, memes, trash, alternative family structures, queer theory, queer practice, belief systems, psychology, everyday life, social class, anarchism, technology, characterisation, improvisation, collage, storytelling, interventions, activism, sports, performance art, archives, site specific work, walking, script-writing, found objects, neurodiversity, alternative ways of living, counterculture, ecology, food and sustainability.

Featured publications

2020: Dead Relevant, 2020.
Meme-riddled film about the life of Nic, a character in a 17th Century Frans Hals painting, who is turned into a jpeg and uploaded onto the internet where he seeks relevance as an influencer, beardpre

2021: Uplands: Utopia I.O.U
Solo exhibition at Bobinska Brownlee, London. Sit on bespoke drain covers to watch a 20-minute animation made from trash

2018: Boring Talks: Argos Catalogue, Call Centres and Breakfast Cereal
Three BBC Sounds audio performances psychoanalysing and speculating about everyday phenomena. Search all episodes on BBC Sounds to see all three.

2017: I'd Rather Be Shopping
Solo show at Arebyte Gallery. Works made in response to an unofficial residency in a Westfield shopping mall, notably the undercover video poem Unicorns of Westfield.

2019: Awkward Stowage, performance at Art Night London
Rambling through treasures salvaged from local waste tips, charity shops, and cupboards under the stairs, Louise and her collaborator Fritha Jenkins conjure darkly comic gestures and narratives.

Publications and research outputs

Art Object

Article

Artist's Book

Audio

Broadcast

Film/Video

Performance

Show/Exhibition

Conferences and talks

2019: Speaking Fiction to Power
Keynote at 36th Chaos Communication Congress (2019, Leipzig). CCC is an annual conference organized by the Chaos Computer Club.