Wandering Places: Ashley Amery

Wandering Places is Ashley Amery’s first solo exhibition at the Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery. Beginning with intricate marks, as seedlings or saplings, Amery’s paintings grow gradually, reflecting the very processes of nature in their creation.

Amery uses gouache paint and ink on paper, creating detailed layers to build otherworldly abstractions rooted in familiar organic shapes. 

'Revisiting a painted surface many times over the course of weeks or months is essential to the development of my work, resulting in images that are as much a tracing out of time as a representation of my imagined world.'  - Ashley Amery

Amery draws on inspirations as diverse as botanical illustration, early modernist painting, and the garden outside her studio. Her method also reflects an appreciation of hand-rendered craft derived from the Pre- Colombian traditions of Latin America and Southern California that she was exposed to during a childhood spent in San Diego, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. The hand-painted pottery and woven tapestries of these cultures inform Amery’s imaginative engagement with colour and pattern.

Ashley Amery is a San Diego born London-based artist. She studied Art in Los Angeles and Florence before completing an MA in Book Arts at Camberwell College of Art in London. Amery has worked as an illustrator and printmaker, and has exhibited internationally.