Louise Ashcroft is an artist who makes video, performance, audio, watercolours and objects which humorously chronicle her critical meddling in real life situations. Often, her work involves analysing cultural content (like the Argos catalogue, call centres, tech culture, the reproductive industry or breakfast cereal marketing).
She has made several audio works for BBC Sounds and has spoken at leading digital arts festivals such as KIKK and Chaos Computer Congress. She has presented work at Frans Hals Museum (NL), Museum of London Lates, Wellcome Lates, BQ Berlin, Arebyte, Bobinska Brownlee, Tate Learning, Open Space Contemporary, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Artsadmin, Turf Projects, Duckie, Coastal Currents Festival, Camden People's Theatre, Supernormal Festival and Latitude Festival. She teaches Fine Art at Goldsmiths, London, and co-founded the free peer-led art school AltMFA in 2010.
She likes expensive trainers and angry Marxist rhetoric.
Louise says
"My work looks at barriers to starting a family as a queer woman, and the personal relationships that are in play in these decisions. We need to be rethinking social structures of parenting, not always going down the ‘nuclear’ style family and gender binary structures. I didn't want to be a parent or non parent in a relationship, I just want to be involved in a family! How can someone parent without being a traditional ‘having a baby’ parent?
Childfree by choice is a movement focused on choice, which can be problematic. Choice is a very loaded word, but is also a word that capitalism is based on. Having kids or not is not always a choice for people. Like for me, but then that means you can explore different ways to be ‘family’, which can be equally exciting."
Useful links
https://www.louiseashcroft.org/bird-hut.html
Insta @louiseashcroft1