Ashley Sandham

Ashley graduated from Fanshawe Fine Art in 2021. Her large-scale figurative oil painting’s
themes of isolation, loneliness and metamorphosis. Leveraging the experience of growing
up as an alienated individual in a rural community to create moody psychologically charged
paintings. The figures have an ethereal presence; placing more emphasis on the colour
tones than being anatomically correct; they borrow elements from abstraction as the figures
twist and shift into different perspectives as if transitioning themselves on the canvas. The
figures symbolically represent the masculine and feminine-self to express concepts of
questioning one’s sexuality and gender identity which often requires a lot of introspection
growing up in a non-accepting environment. In relation to the landscapes so of the figures
are dwarfed or melded with the landscape to represent insecurity and the feeling of being
stuck.