Jessica Ashman (b.1986) is Jamaican Black British interdisciplinary artist, based in London and born in Birmingham, UK.

Using silk painting, textiles, animation, music (sometimes performing as Spirit Sigh), soundscapes and interventional performance, Ashman creates immersive installations that dream of liberated futures for the Global Majority who have been historically silenced. She imagines what resistance looked like historically, how it manifests contemporarily in society and what it could be speculatively in the future, unbound by colonial logic and control.

Ashman’s practice is rooted in the Black Caribbean diaspora archive, both personal and institutional. She is aiming to dismantle the archive as a gatekeeper of knowledge and is particularly interested in the blurred space between fact, folklore and mythology and how this connects to archival absence and cultural inheritance; who decides what ancestral history is passed down?

Increasingly, Ashman’s practice has merged speculative approaches with an exploration of land, ecology and ancestral connection, grounded by her cultural heritage. Alongside formal training in horticulture through the London-based co-op OrganicLea, Ashman has begun exploring colonial botanical extraction and Caribbean diasporic relationships to land, both in Jamaica and the UK. This research informs worldbuilding rooted not only in imagination but in soil, seed, and survival.

Her practice is also informed by a commitment to arts education, teaching experimental animation techniques at Goldsmiths’ Media and Communications BA and facilitating workshops at institutions like South London Gallery, Camden Arts Centre, National Maritime Museum and Tate Modern. In these pedagogical engagements, Ashman seeks to challenge power structures and advocate for care, community, and collective liberation within arts education systems.

Ashman is a Royal College of Art Graduate (MA Animation 2014), A BAFTA in Scotland (2011) award winning animator and an Arts Foundation Futures Awards Nominee for Experimental Short Film. Her work has been supported by Animate Projects, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, 198 Contemporary, Modern Painters New Decorators, Focal Point Gallery, New Art Exchange, Jerwood and Arts Council England.


To discuss future projects and commissions,  please contact her at hello@jessla.co.uk