Elise Ashby: Drawings Made in Lockdown

Laura Harris

Elise Ashby is an artist working in contemporary drawing and printmaking, based in Edinburgh. Her work is interested in the construction of ‘environment’ in both urban and natural spaces, and ideas of ecology, anthropocentrism, evolution and habitation. Following on from their artist-writer collaboration for the May 2019 issue of the Fourdrinier, Laura Harris continues the creative exchange with a series of letters to Elise in response to drawings of found objects she began making during lockdown.

i.

Dear Elise,

I’ve been meaning to write to you but time keeps drifting past. It’s one of the many strangenesses that I’ve found this year: an inability to take time to collect my thoughts. I know I’ll regret not having tried to find words to catch the unsettling passage of these last months.

I guess as part of this avoidance of the present, I’ve used some of the languid time to reflect on my recent past and near future. This has been one of the small graces. Although I’d hoped the dust would begin to settle on a fresh sense of purpose, that hasn’t quite materialised. Instead, I have moments where things seem to take on a meaningful form in a kind of sketchy and disconnected way.

Some things I’ve realised: I enjoy writing, but I don’t enjoy the industry of it. I enjoy writing most when it’s playful. I loved our piece together last year, where we tried to work out how my writing and your drawing could come together. I want more of this. Other things: I miss the cinema but not the gallery. The bookshop but not the city. I miss the idea of traveling, but not the business of it.

I saw a photo you took on Instagram recently of objects you’ve found in Edinburgh. You’ve always been particularly good at finding nice things. I couldn’t make out what they all were, but that’s not the point I suppose, and it was a pleasing assembly. I couldn’t even work out the different textures: some strange porous rocks, some rusted metal (which I always find disgusting, actually), and some plant-matter?

You’d laid them out just so on the paper. I imagine that was quite therapeutic. I hope it took time. Will you draw them?

Unlike you, I don’t have to walk an hour each day to work and back, finding things along the way. I worked from home before all this, and I’ll work from home after. I suppose you could say that while you’re finding material things in your world, I’m finding immaterial things in mine. I find a certain slicing of the morning sun pleasing; I find I regret smoking out of the window, again.

Softly, and without urgency, I’m beginning to miss the rhythms of my pre-lockdown day. I think of you, walking to work, as I pad into my living room.

I should have visited last month. I’ll visit soon. And if not (because who really knows), I’ll write.

Laura

ii.

Dear Elise,

I’m just writing after seeing a recent drawing of yours. If I’ve understood correctly, you are drawing objects you find as you walk around your Edinburgh. I thought you might!

I’m not sure what it was of, to be honest (perhaps I show my naivety in thinking it was ‘of’ anything at all?). Anyway, I liked it very much. It looked a bit like a human heart. Also, pumice. It reminded me of a painting I have up in my living room by José Ramón Amondarain Ubarretxena of balled-up dried-up oil paint. We saw the painting together in San Sebastian; do you remember?

Last night I dragged my mattress into my living room. It was nice to wake up somewhere else. The angle of the morning light was slightly different, and the treey sounds I wake up to everyday were that bit further away. It felt like a holiday, sensitised as I now am to all these subtle variations in my own flat that I’m finding. The idea of actually being on holiday is very alien—the sheer rush of new sensations! I find it a bit overwhelming to imagine! Still, I like to remember our trip to the Basque when I see Ubarretxena’s painting hanging on my wall. Beer mixed with lemonade, and pintxos.

Your drawings tell me that you’re still finding time in your day to do some concentrated looking and creating. I’m glad. It seems everyone is finding solace in creativity at the moment but I know you always have.

I’m sure being locked out of the print workshop is frustrating. Your prints have a different energy to your drawings. More blocky, more planned. I know you work from sketch into print, and I wonder if you’ve found it strange to have that final step cut off. Has it lent the act of sketching a different quality? I’m sure every artist in lockdown is finding their practice changing by virtue of what they have (and no longer have) access to.

All this from a pumice-heart! I’m looking at it more now; such fine lines, and the way the shadow bleeds into the paper...

Let’s talk soon, Elise.

Laura

PS. I Googled pumice to check that that was what I mean. Ended up in an internet hole looking at pictures of ‘Kutkhiny Baty’—have you seen it? It’s this amazing, weird Russian valley. Then I Googled ‘Weird Valley’ and read of the ‘Uncanny Valley’ theory in aesthetics about the ‘relationship between the degree of an object's resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to such an object.’ Got me thinking about my response to your drawings; I feel much more sympathetically towards the objects when I think they’re fleshy or organic, not rusty and metallic. My thinking is skittish and circuitous, as you can see. 

iii.

Dear Elise,

I saw another one of your drawings of found things. I found it quite threatening, to be honest. I think it’s bolts, but it could be tubes of paint. Anyway, it’s definitely metal and you know how I feel about metal.

You’d lined them up—whatever they were—into a row of four. They looked like they were in military formation. They could have been shrapnel, actually, which doesn’t help soften the sketch.

Anyway, I just thought I’d tell you that I found it creepy. Take that as a compliment though; you’ve clearly created something with a kind of charge. I’m used to finding your work beautiful—and I’m not saying this isn’t—but it did something different to me. I hope that’s not a rude thing to say? Despite having been an art writer for years I guess I still don’t know the etiquette of talking to artists.

I’m surrounded by rusty and unwanted bits of metal. My house has been ensconced in scaffolding all lockdown, it went up on the very last day it could have. I remember it particularly vividly because the builders were listening to the radio and I woke up to REM’s ‘It’s the End of the World as We Know It.’ I thought: “If I made this little anecdote up in a piece of writing it would be so laboured and cheesy.” Real life keeps seeming like bad writing.

It’s been months now that every window I look out of (which is pretty much every vision of the world that I’m living with) is cut through by ugly tubes of metal. Sometimes I think I can sense that the scaffolding is edging closer (like Great Birnam wood!), crushing the house slowly slowly. Other times, I think it’s all that’s holding the house together, and if it were to go the house would fall apart with a big exhale. I’m sure you’d appreciate the angular shadows it casts on my floor; I’m sure you’d draw it.

Anyway, I hope you’re keeping well.

Laura

iv.

Dear Elise,

I found a very nice rock today. If I were you, I would draw it. Jon says it looks like Liqoriche Allsorts (spelling?). I hate liqoriche so I’m trying not to let that taint my appreciation of the rock.

I haven’t seen any new drawings from you for a while. I’ve deleted Instagram (which would probably explain it). As lockdown eases, I’m beginning to find social media a direct line back to things like ‘fomo’ that I’m hoping to leave behind. I’ve been enjoying the space from social pressures; I hope that doesn’t make me sound too antisocial.

My friend sometimes goes on Google Street View to ‘walk around’ other places. It gives her that sense of elsewhere. That would never work for me. Your sketches are much more evocative of the grains of a place, the smallest details of its character. I like the attention you pour onto these things that would slip beyond most people’s notice (including mine). As my horizons have been constrained to my flat and my local park, your drawings flesh out a world of stuff still out there.

In many ways, the unknowable in the world has been one of the hardest things to live with over these last few months. On the personal level, it’s been a not-knowing of what the next weeks and months would afford, and whether the feared would one day tip over into reality. On the bigger scale, it’s been cast as a ‘battle’ between ‘science’ and a new and unknown threat. We’ve talked often about the unknowable, or rather the otherwise-knowable – sensory and tacit knowledges; I think this is what you explore in your art. Your small sketches of curious things you’ve found remind me that the unknowability of the world can be part of its charm, its beguiling enchantment. 

Perhaps when I can next visit you in Edinburgh I’ll be so trained I can point out things on the street for you to draw?

Anyway, it’s a sad side-effect of leaving Instagram that I haven’t kept up with your finds. Perhaps you would be so kind as to send me some?

They’re like little missives from streets I can’t tread.

Until I can,

Laura

 v.

Dear Elise,

I wanted to send you a short note as lockdown begins to end and I’m cautiously expanding my horizons. I’m starting to find more and more of my own curiosities. After my liquorish rock (I looked up how to spell it) I found a really lovely bit of dried grass. I picked it thinking you’d appreciate it.

As I remain off Instagram, I guess I’m replacing your found things with my own. I just wanted to say that I’ve learnt a way of looking from you, a sensory attention. I think that’s quite a remarkable thing to have happened. In my most grandiose moments I think that this is exactly what art can do – teach us how to see better, or to see feelingly.

It’s one thing to try and take these lessons from impersonal gallery walls. It’s another to do it within a friendship.

I hope to see and hear from you soon.

From Liverpool to Edinburgh,

Laura

P.S. The scaffolding came down this week.