Photo: Cooper Brady
Dr Karike Ashworth is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist-researcher-teacher living and working in Meeanjin (Brisbane). Her experimental research practice consists of performance, time-based media, objects, and installations. Her practice is informed by a feminist epistemological approach, in that she views the world through a woman’s perspective—always—and uses her practice to build knowledge and understanding of how patriarchal structures, like gendered expectations, control and contain women. She has exhibited widely, received national awards, and her work is held in numerous national public collections. Karike is Vice President of Australian Museums and Galleries Association Queensland (AMaGAQ), a Sessional Academic at QUT (Creative Industries), and holds a PhD in Visual Arts and a Master of Secondary Teaching from QUT.
and the extraordinary
Hooping Loop (2019)
Photo: Andrea Higgins
Practice
Dr Karike Ashworth’s practice is grounded in the studio model, in that it privileges deep, ongoing cycles of experimentation, failure, and success. This way of working facilitates a slow, reflective habit of inquiry that drives her research and creative process. Consequently, her work often oscillates between employing bemusing hyper-spectacle as a subversive strategy and using banal, typically ‘unspectacular’ materials. Her performative persona Brave Girl is an example of her use of hyper-spectacle in performance. She uses her body in this way because it helps her to, as she describes, “more clearly see my contradictions as a woman and a feminist navigating contemporary society”. This is because, “the voice of the culture is in our bodies.” Reflecting on Brave Girl she has recently said that she might “retire her” and has been wondering whether this is because she is getting older and is “less confident about getting my body out in public”. Of course, as she says, “this is a terrible contradiction and so I should probably make a work about Brave Girl as she gets old!”. Watch this space!
Photo: Caroline Austin
Dr Ashworth’s objects-based practice typically has a domestic or what might be called private or intimate quality to it. Her processes in the studio usually feature aspects that come from her Anglo heritage as a woman—in that there is a lot of dedicated, time-consuming, and intimate stitching into things. As she describes it, “I am usually drawn to materials and processes that are typically shunned, discarded, marginalised or usually uninteresting to people, or associated with intimate, domestic, or feminised places or things. They remind me of parts of ourselves and/or our culture that are not talked about or valued.” The connection between her performance and object-based practices is their temporality—either in the subject matter of the work or in the making process. “My interest in time is phenomenological—in that it mimics or encapsulates feminine containment or discipline, and the time and space to be with it—to wrestle with it or to contemplate it.”
Photo: Ian Morris
Highlights
Dr Karike Ashworth graduated from the Queensland College of Art in 2013 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, receiving the Godfrey River Medal for outstanding studio performance and selection as a finalist in the Graduate Art Show (GAS) at Griffith University Art Gallery. The following year she completed Honours in Visual Arts at QUT with First Class Honours and was a finalist in Excerpts: Visual Arts Showcase at The Block. Awarded a full scholarship to undertake her PhD in Visual Arts at QUT (2016–2019), this period saw the emergence of her Brave Girl persona. Her work has since received multiple awards, including the Queensland Regional Arts Textile Art Award and First Prize in the Moreton Bay Region Art Prize (2022), Highly Commended in the Sunshine Coast National Art Prize (2021), and the AAANZ Research in Focus Award for her PhD research (2020). Solo exhibitions include Lamentation, touring Queensland and NSW (with Arts Queensland support) (2014–2018), Home of the Brave I (2016), Home of the Brave II (2017), #SoBrave: an exhibition of Brave Girls (2018), Dr Brave Girl and the extraordinary Hooping Loop (2019), Always soft, Always strong (2021, 2024), and Brave Girl: The Warrior (The Condensery, Somerset, 2022). Before pursuing a career in the visual arts, Dr Ashworth worked in the financial services industry for ten years with PricewaterhouseCoopers and Deutsche Bank in Brisbane and London.