Claire Ashley: Chromatic Blush

For over a decade, Scottish-born, Chicago-based artist Claire Ashley (born 1971) has been pushing the boundaries of painting, developing a unique visual language through her vibrant, colorfully painted inflatables. These unconventional sculptural forms are dynamic surfaces for abstract painting, pulsating with raw energy and slapstick humor. Lumpy and colorful, they embrace imperfection and challenge conventional notions of taste, beauty, and fine art. In their two states—deflated and inflated—they mirror the human body’s processes of tension and release, inhale and exhale, offering a compelling metaphor for our own physical existence. Defying traditional categorizations, Ashely’s accessible, good-humored work melds art and life in playful and generous ways while asking provocative questions about cultural norms.

Ashley’s inflatables are also frequently rooted in narrative. In Chromatic Blush, she invites viewers to explore an imagined evolutionary moment in a future terrain where hybrid organisms have evolved out of our time, the Anthropocene. One such creature, the monumental Star Patrick, floats above the ground, its surface so alive with colors that it seems to breathe. Beneath it huddles another smaller piece, like its newborn offspring. Bizarre and voluminous, these and other inflatables both inhabit and sculpt the space into a mountainous landscape filled with their bawdy energy. An evocative soundscape composed by her frequent collaborator, Joshua Patterson, deepens the sensory experience, immersing viewers in Ashley’s fully imagined and tangible future world.

Visitors can feel the boundaries between real and imagined time dissolve as they navigate the installation, sensing their way through a future populated by these radiant, incongruous forms. Ashley’s work celebrates this possibility, offering a vision of a new world in all its messy and glorious complexity. In this space, Ashley’s hybrids invite us to reconsider what it means to be alive—and whether objects can also be alive—in a constantly evolving world.

Ashley’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries, museums, site-specific installations, and performances, such as Beacon Arts Center, Scotland (2022); the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, United Kingdom (2021); and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas (2019), among many others. Her new augmented reality piece is currently on view at Millennium Park in downtown Chicago as part of Augmented Chicago: Inaugural Realities, a celebration of the park’s 20-year anniversary. Ashley currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

This exhibition is organized by Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design, curated by Rangsook Yoon, Ph.D., senior curator, Sarasota Art Museum.

Photo credit: Claire Ashley (Scottish, born 1971). Clown VII, 2023. Spray paint on PVC coated ripstop nylon, fan, approx. 7 x 6 x 6 ft. Courtesy of the artist.