18/05/2026
*SATURDAY 23rd MAY OPENING Rachel Bride Ashton has now officially installed her Solo Show ‘FECUNDITY’ and we are absolutely thrilled to see it up 🤩! We cannot wait to celebrate this with you all this Saturday the 23rd of May from 18:00-21:00 ❤️❤️❤️
There will be vinyl from .gould, many thanks for that 🤩and also some complimentary refreshments for the first hour Prosecco/Beer/Soft drinks ❤️
‘Rachel Bride Ashton is a Scottish multi-disciplinary artist, writer and musician who lives off-grid in Aberdeenshire. Having made her living as a painter for over twenty years, she returned to formal education in Dundee in 2019 and is the recipient of the Freelands Painting Prize 2022. Graduating from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design with a first-class honours degree in 2022, she won the Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) Award, Generator Projects Prize and the James Guthrie Orchar Prize for her degree show installation which featured female empowered birth practices, separation compost toilets and good bacteria. She is currently completing a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of Aberdeen and is working on a novel set in a world full of sentient fungi.
Rachel’s work (and life) blurs the lines between where we stop and the land begins. She is concerned with honouring a ‘multispecies alliance’, moving away from the fetishising of nature, and challenging the problematic nature of the word ‘Green’.
This group of paintings explore earthly bodies – our fraught relationship with flora, fauna and our own microbiota. Celebrating fertility cycles through the interweaving of flesh with the fecundity and vigour of burgeoning spring and summer lushness to the dying of all things - the constant process of returning everything to the earth.
Rachel’s work has been shaped by the magical illustrations of children’s picture books from the seventies and the painters of the Art Nouveau, Symbolist and Surrealist periods. Despite the Utopian appearance of these paintings, there is often an acknowledgement of the anxiety and threats from which we are never free, creating a tension between dark and joyful.’
