Ashton Lexie Jamieson and Sharleen Gamble: Young Art

Ashton Lexie Jamieson and Sharleen Gamble: Young Art | Foyer Gallery

7 August – 24 October 2021

The contemporary concept of young art is work not defined by the age of the creator, but by the stage the artist is at in their career.

This exhibition brings together the work of two Hawke’s Bay artists working in two different disciplines who have both reached a significant stage in their career development.

Sharleen Gamble and Ashton Lexie Jamieson are both recent graduates of IDEAschool at EIT and they are both wanting, through their work, to create an awareness of the quality and diversity of contemporary female artists at work in Hawke’s Bay.

Sharleen is a sculptor who celebrates materials in themselves, including their embodied histories, and she works to enable their narrative possibilities, and material voice to emerge.

She assembles wood, steel, used materials, and found objects, fabricating abstract forms through exploration, haptic and chance processes to generate material conversations.

Ashton Lexie Jamieson is a teacher of Visual Arts at Sacred Heart College. Ashton is obsessed with paper, thread, pre-loved domestic objects and above all her process. Ladies with collaged armour from repurposed magazines form the paper soldiers in ‘Ashton’s Army’ – a growing collection that is the product of a femmage-based methodolgy and regime, where strict rules converse with her innate studio happenings and scraps are saved and sorted as precious items.

Ashton seeks to contribute and further nourish an enduring historical and contemporary feminine language; as the decorative, quiet-yet-quirky revolution that her practice is and continues to become.

Image credit:
Sharleen Gamble, Ashton Lexie Jamieson, Young Art, 2021