Margaret Ashman's imagery is carefully constructed from her own photography and borrowed elements from sources such as fabrics, garments, wallpaper, or books with an oriental influence. The Japanese dancer, Chisato Minamimura, features regularly in the work, having performed improvised dance and a number of sequences of sign language for the Deaf (Chisato is deaf) for Margaret's camera.
She collaborates with the dancer, giving her a poem, phrase or idea to interpret. The resulting photographs act as a starting point, from which the work evolves. Further layers of imagery are added creating new constructs until the etching process translates the final image into a coherent whole. The addition of birds, flowers and other elements allows the viewer a window into the subconscious inner world of the artist.
She strives for a spiritual elegance and simplicity in her finished works, in contrast to the lengthy, complicated process of making. Ashman is an experienced printmaker specializing in photo-etching and screenprinting. She trained at the Universities of Hertfordshire and Brighton and is also an Oxford graduate. She is currently a member of the RE, the Printmakers Council and The Greenwich Printmakers. She was recently invited to the Guanlan Print Base in southern China as an International Artist in Residence. Margaret's work is in a number of collections in China including the Guandong Museum of Art and Shenzhen University.
