Louise Ashcroft

Staff details

Louise Ashcroft

Position

Tutor in Studio Practice

Department

Art

Email

L.Ashcroft (@gold.ac.uk)

Humorously anarchic stories about disrupting social norms and power structures, often as performance/video/animation

Louise’s performances, videos, animations and installations chronicle her playfully disruptive investigations into the conventions of ordinary places like shopping centres, trade fairs, internet spaces, stranger’s homes, museums and the street. By directly challenging the rules and logic of such contexts through her interventions and overly-detailed comical analyses, she questions the bizarre norms of late capitalism and catalyses new myths; frequently bringing the viewer along as a co-conspirator through interactive workshops and experimental experiences which rethink social protocol. Capitalism is the clown, not Louise - she's just there for the ride. Louise is currently building a no-frills community sperm bank outside her house using an old B&Q bird box for her forthcoming stage show 'Crowdmum' which explores alternatives to conventional family structures.

Academic qualifications

  • MA Cultural and Critical Studies, Birkbeck, University of London 2008
  • BFA Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford 2004

Research interests

Interests include: Comedy, radical education, hackathons and ethical hacking, marketing, design, the internet, memes, trash, alternative family structures, queer theory, queer practice, belief systems, psychology, everyday life, social class, anarchism, technology, characterisation, improvisation, collage, storytelling, interventions, activism, sports, performance art, archives, site specific work, walking, script-writing, found objects, neurodiversity, alternative ways of living, counterculture, ecology, food and sustainability.

Publications and research outputs

Art Object

Ashcroft, Louise. 2018. Street Racket.

Ashcroft, Louise. 2018. Urban Investopedia.

Broadcast

Ashcroft, Louise. 2020. BBC Sounds - The Boring Talks, #52 - Breakfast Cereals.

Ashcroft, Louise. 2018. Boring Talks #06 - The Argos Catalogue, The Boring Talks - BBC Radio.

Film/Video

Ashcroft, Louise. 2020. Dead Relevant.

Ashcroft, Louise. 2017. Unicorns of Westfield.

Performance

Ashcroft, Louise. 2023. Bird Hut Sperm Bank. In: "Women and Children First festival", Viernulvier, Ghent, Belgium, 1 - 11 March 2023.

Ashcroft, Louise. 2018. All Our Lives. In: "All Our Lives", Salisbury Arts Centre, 4th Oct to 10th Nov 2018.

Ashcroft, Louise. 2018. Talking to a Brick Wall. In: "Talking to a Brick Wall", CCA Goldsmiths, United Kingdom, 23rd September 2018.

Show/Exhibition

Ashcroft, Louise. 2021. Uplands: Utopia I.O.U. In: "Uplands: Utopia I.O.U", Bobinska Brownlee Gallery, London, United Kingdom, 22 April - 23 May 2021.

Ashcroft, Louise. 2019. Whose Croytopia?. In: "Fungus Press Residency: 'Whose Croytopia?'", Turf Projects, Croydon, United Kingdom, 2 February - 2 April 2019.

Ashcroft, Louise. 2018. Party Platforms: Deptford X Special Project Commission 2018. In: "Deptford X Festival 2018", 1 Market Yard, Deptford, United Kingdom, Project ran January to September 2018, with exhibition 21st - 30th September 2018.

Conferences and talks

2019: Speaking Fiction to Power
Keynote at 36th Chaos Communication Congress (2019, Leipzig). CCC is an annual conference organized by the Chaos Computer Club.