Carly Ashdown

Carly Ashdown looks to explore the fragility and beauty of life through creative expression, building on texture and exploring different materials, developing and experimenting, creating pieces of beauty for your home.

One of the most primal needs we have is to feel safe. When magnified by our ego and corralled by the protocols of society, this can interrupt our very openness to the experience of being.

Ashdown stepped away from safety when she made the decision to leave a flourishing career in television to paint full-time. Ashdown studied psychoanalytical psychotherapy at Tavistock to better inform, develop and nurture the bedrock of her work. Her aim is not just to move people, but to support them in their experience of that movement.

In Ashdown’s practice, the need for safety is beautifully absent. Here is an opportunity to step away from the containment driven by the underlying uncertainty of life into a space of discovery and freedom, exploring the experience of “being” in an organic, intuitive and non-semiotic process. Ashdown’s approach is as a conversation between herself and the emerging painting. Ashdown considers her work to be a place of exploration.

This invitation is to create a space where a person can step into the unknown and be held there, to support the viewer to hold an encounter with themselves which includes and transcends the everyday. Works by Ashdown are in private collections worldwide.