ASHLEY LANDE ‘Truth + Magical Love = Freedom’1st June 2009

In June 2009 ‘Truth + Magical Love = Freedom’ an exhibition by Ahsley lande launched at Old Shoreditch Station. Follow the link to see images of the exhibition.

Ashley Lande’s practise is totally self-taught and self-inspired having received no formal art education. After drawing for a number of years her work pushed into a new realm, subsequent to her first experiences using psychedelics. Ashley describes these experiences as an adventure into a whole new world, one that she felt impelled to try and express artistically. The work in this exhibit is a definite insight into her psychotropic apparitions. Using the mixed media of coloured pencils, pens, graphite and oil paints, Ashley creates multicoloured collaged portraits. These autobiographical images portray life, death, past lives, the after life, Ashley and her loved ones, as well as Shamans and animals; conjuring a paganistic feel within her work which straddles the border between folk and fine art.

Ashley was born and still lives in Kansas city. This was her first ever solo exhibit in the UK.

“I have had mornings kicking down the cobblestones still wet from the rebirth the pillow of the night still beneath you; illuminations that hold the very air in vacuumed rapture; glitter, glittering glittered things surrounding; the love that pervades, the heart whole-made; the oceanic absorption and magic rhythmic mandala shuddering and rippling outward from its centrifuge which is the centre of all mystery and life; the Christ love received through eyes lachrymaed and I giving back with the only love I know which is absolute surrender but still a treacly trickle upon the flood entering me; leaves that shudder whispery below the unfurling clouds and the diamond sky; visions untranslatable that evade paper but I still try; also I have had darkness that swallows and shapes that do not meet with the shrillest disharmony; candlelit hells spent in the inhospitable spiral of Papadiabolus; rarely I have had hell but more often I have had heaven as should be granted unto all of us.”

Ashley Lande.