Chimera Island is an immersive new installation at the Loughborough based gallery Modern Painters, New Decorators. 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 centres on an imagined island; a hybrid space 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 conjures Chimera Island: 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.
At the heart of the exhibition is a new large-scale textile installation in 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.
Chimera Island also includes two previously made works (back two panels) ‘ The Rhizosphere’ (2025) - silk dye, archival pen and watercolour pencil on Habatoi silk
and
(Front panel) ‘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.
