Chimera Island
Silk dye, watercolour pencil, archival pen and natural dyes (Brazilwood, Logwood, Madder and Ivy) on Habatoi silk and silk chiffon (2025)
Chimera Island was exhibited at Modern Painters, New Decorators, Loughborough from September 6th to November 1st, 2025 The exhibition reimagines landscapes as sites of resistance, refuge, and radical re-connection for Black, brown and Global Majority communities. Working across textiles, animation, sound, and natural dyeing, Chimera Island explores how colonial histories haunt rural spaces and how those same spaces might be reimagined through a speculative, restorative lens.
The exhibition centred on a new large-scale textile installation which is the exhibitions name sake, Chimera Island; an imagined island, drawing inspiration from personal experience, landscape research, and myth. Ashman weaves together references to Brazil Island in Leicestershire (a renamed islet in Swithland Reservoir) and the legend of Hy-Brasil — a phantom island from Irish folklore said to appear once every seven years. Out of these entangled geographies, Ashman conjured a speculative refuge for those displaced by empire, where Black, brown and Global Majority identities can commune with land outside the logics of conquest, forced labour, and exclusion through ancestral connection.
The piece comprises of vivid pinks and magentas, dyed using Brazilwood and Logwood — a material historically linked to colonial extraction and trade. The works unfold like exploded storyboards: layered scenes and characters suspended in space, weaving together silk painting, sound, and hand-drawn animation; a visual meditation on identity, resistance, and the possibility of reimagining place.
The installation is soundtracked by a soundscape created by Ashman, entitled ‘You Just Gotta Make A Path’, comprising of recordings made on Brazil Island and original music.
Ashman was interviewed about Chimera Island and her ideas behind the project by artist, Ama Dogbe, for YAC, which you can read here.
Installation photos by Joshua Jones
The exhibition also included two previously made works ‘ The Rhizosphere’ (2025 - back two panels) and ‘when you rip the people from the earth, you also rip the earth from the people’ (2024 - Front panel) as well as a special single channel edition edit of Ashman’s moving image piece, All Power Emanates From The Land (2025)
‘The Rhizosphere’ (2025) - Silk dye, archival pen and watercolour pencil on Habatoi silk
‘when you rip the people from the earth, you also rip the earth from the people’ (2024) - Silk paint and acrylic ink on Habatoi silk and wooden branch.
‘All Power Emanates From The Land’ - (2025) – digital animation and archival footage.
