Kelsey Ashe
“The landscape changes completely at night…Familiar places become mysterious. Shadows behave differently, colours dissolve, and you begin to notice things that daylight hides. ”
Dr Kelsey Ashe is an Australian artist, author, and researcher whose interdisciplinary practice traverses eco-surrealism, mythology, ritual, and environmental humanities to explore the hidden relationships between landscape, culture, and the sublime. Working across printmaking, writing, film, and performance, her work emerges from sustained encounters with place, drawing together ecological observation, history, symbolism, and poetic imagination.
Ashe holds a Doctorate of Philosophy (Art) and has developed an internationally recognised practice-led research methodology that embraces intuition, embodiment, symbolism, and contemplative inquiry as legitimate forms of knowledge. Her practice often occupies the fertile territory between art and scholarship, where observation meets imagination and landscape becomes both subject and collaborator.
Drawing from traditions as diverse as eco-poetics, feminist surrealism, folklore, mysticism, and environmental philosophy, Ashe creates works that invite reflection on humanity's relationship with the more-than-human world. Through slow, immersive processes of studio making and field research, she seeks not simply to represent landscape, but to reveal its capacity for wonder, enchantment, and transformation.
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Lives and works in Perth, WA
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Selected Exhibitions
2026
Hadleys Art Prize Finalist, Hadleys Orient Hotel, Hobart TAS
A Call and Response Across the Ocean, Perth Festival, John Curtin Gallery, Perth WA
2025
The Foreign Within, Wallace at With Gallery, Perth WA
Walyalup Fremantle Print Award Finalist, Fremantle Arts Centre WA
2024–2025
The Deep Green Sea, Bunbury Regional Art Gallery WA
2024
Resurface: Gothic Tales from the Indian Ocean, IOTA24: Codes in Parallel, Alcoa Mandurah Art Gallery WA
Paper Trails, Singapore Art Week Sculpture 2502, National Arts Council, Singapore
York Botanic Art Prize Finalist, York WA
2023
EPIC WORKS: From the Horn Collection of WA Art, Bunbury Regional Art Gallery WA
2022
Cartography of Care, Spilt Milk Gallery, Edinburgh UK
Wam Wardanup: Strangers on the Shore, Wardan 2022 Perth Festival, Holmes à Court Gallery WA
Divergent Terrain, Artsource Fremantle WA
2021
Cladogram International Biennale, Katonah Museum of Art, New York USA
Melville Art Award Finalist, Wireless Hill Museum WA
IAP Joondalup Invitation Art Award Finalist, Whitford City WA
Aura, IOTA21 Indian Ocean Craft Triennial, Kidogo Art House WA
Archetype, Solo Exhibition, Moores Building WA
Margins, Barrett Art Center, New York USA
2020
Tracing the Swan, Gallery Holmes à Court, Vasse Felix WA
Electric Muses Film Festival, Edinburgh UK
Imaginary Territories, PS Art Space, Fremantle WA
Gesture and Motion, Site Gallery, New York USA
31 Women, Sedona Arts Centre, USA
The Debutante, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh UK
2019
UnderCurrent 2019, Fremantle Biennale, WA Maritime Museum WA
2018
Dark Swan: Contemporary Tales of the Gothic Antipodes, PS Art Space WA
Imaginary Aesthetic Territories, John Curtin Gallery WA
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2026
Haydley’s Art Prize, IAS Art Handlers' Award and Residency Prize Winner
Collections
St John of God Hospital
City of Melville Art Collection
Holmes à Court Art Collection
Apparatus Art & Culture Collection
City of Fremantle Art Collection
Horn Collection of Contemporary West Australian Art
City of Joondalup Art Collection
City of Bunbury Art Collection
City of Burnie Art Collection, Tasmania
John Curtin Gallery University Collection
Idée Fixe, Vasse Felix