Journal of Writing & Environment

Three mixed media works

Visual Art by Ashley Blanton

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Ashley Blanton is entangled in a compulsive need to create. She received her Bachelor’s Degree in 2008 from the College of Santa Fe, focusing her studies on Studio Art and Psychology. In May 2012, Ashley graduated from Pratt Institute with a Master’s Degree in Art Therapy and Creativity Development. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. More of Ashley’s artwork can be seen on her website: http://www.paperdollparts.com.

Ashley’s work explores the societal separation of female body from nature, as well as the psychological schism that occurs as a result of this Cartesian mind-body split. Mythologies and archetypal narratives inform her work, acting as a point of departure for the images that are subsequently created. Ashley utilizes photo transfers, combined with pen, watercolor, gouache, cut paper, and collage, to manipulate found images of women and transform their bodies with natural, botanical, anatomical, and visceral elements. The work is created on old book pages that have been lovingly, sometimes fitfully, removed from their spines. The imagery in the work alludes to the fears, traumas, violations, abandonments, and losses that are experienced by women but often stifled without voice. Ashley aspires to create work that has a visual dialogue with these disavowed aspects of female experience, yet simultaneously makes contact with life-affirming instances of resilience, emergence, awakening, growth, transformation, and connection. By examining themes of fallow and fruition, destruction and creation, burial and transcendence, Ashley hopes to create work that will, in some small way, reconcile the disavowed feminine with the natural roots from which it has been severed.

Journal of Writing & Environment

Ashley Blanton, "Penetrate"

Ashley Blanton, "Compost"

Ashley Blanton, "Wintering"