SOLO EXHIBITION
SOLO EXHIBITION
SOLO EXHIBITION
The World's Leading Contemporary Fine Art Gallery
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The World's Leading Contemporary Fine Art Gallery
Ashley
Irizarry
UNITED STATES
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“The emotions of restless longing, the feeling of not belonging, the desire for something more, inspire and drive my art practice.”
Ashley Irizarry, who goes by the name ‘Hiraeth’, tells herself each time she returns to her “studio” (a corner of the living room) that she is not really an artist and to create something that makes sense of her internal chaos of emotions and thoughts. Chaos, color, and story. That’s what Ashley aims to create in in her art. There’s an internal harmony to her work that tells a story in between the claustrophobia of color crowding the senses.
The work of the Impressionists has always been a significant artistic inspiration for my paintings and 'Golden Sadness' imitates the brightness and blurred lines you'd expect in an Impressionist work.
Ashley tends towards abstract, stylized themes, and the environment, whether it’s the natural world or urban landscapes, they are always present in her pieces. Human subjects rarely appear in her works, and when they do appear, the human figure is fragmented, only a segment in the bigger landscape.
I created 'When the Sky Fell on Me' a few years ago as a simple study in blue. In the end, it became one of my most layered paintings that mimic a watery paradise, a star-studded sky, or evoke the mysteries of deep space. I want the viewers to feel like they're in a dream world that's more tangible than the real world.
Ashley uses different approaches to a work depending on the medium used. The idea for a collage starts with a color and a word that becomes the collage’s main theme. She builds the collage then around that color with an eye on expressing that theme. Collages are very carefully planned and deliberate; she is less structured in her approach to a painting. Paintings (usually completed in acrylic with mixed media elements) start with a particular process or technique that drives the work.
“I create paintings (including acrylics and watercolor), photography, collage, and mixed media works.”
The sensory overload she brings to the canvas mirrors the loudness of the physical world. For Ashley, the world always felt too bright, too hot, too loud, too peopled, too much for a sensitive and an empath. Though born and raised in South Florida, she never felt a sense of belonging.
“Scenes of nature or natural objects amidst urban environments are the most common subjects. Humans, when they appear at all, are tiny background details, the least interesting part of the image.”
Hiraeth is a Welsh word that roughly means a deep longing for home, nostalgia, and homesickness edged with grief over a place forever lost. Ashley explains that this “Hiraeth” feeling has been a companion her entire life. As a child, she would stare up at the stars and feel like there was something else out there, someplace else where she belonged. Home has always felt like someplace far, far from here that she’s always searching for.
'End of all dreams' is the epitome of my painting style, extremely bright colors that pain the eyes. I chose colors associated with joy and excitement but the techniques I used in the painting generate discomfort rather than joy.
“In my photography especially, I aim to recreate for viewers that feeling of loss for a home unremembered, drawing out the sadness and loneliness in the landscapes I photograph.”
I wanted 'Eyesore' to be beautiful; it was a painting I created when I was in a dark mindset in 2020. It was a time for me when everything I saw in the world was harsh and cruel and full of despair; everywhere I looked was an eyesore.
Her paintings are colorful, sometimes painfully bright in color; a deliberate choice that reflects her discomfort as a sensitive person in a world where the volume is always turned up high. There’s a tendency for organic shapes that mimic microscopic cells and biological creatures. Shapes that appear natural, but the bright colors and odd shapes create a sense of discomfort for the viewer. A brightly-colored nightmare world.
'Wisdom in Blue' is a simple piece; truth is simple. Though it's painful and can bring sorrow, I see the wisdom of truth as something small and simple, not a grandiose idea out of reach. Although it's a very small piece, the visual and physical textures within such a small canvas are meant to be echoes of the depth of wisdom and the painfulness of facing the truth.
On the opposite end of these uncomfortably colorful paintings, Ashley also creates more serene “skyscapes” (landscapes that only contain the sky) that mimic the effect of the sky at sunrise, sunset, and all the moods in between. While colorful, these skyscapes tend to use fewer colors and favor the same technique of overlapping, horizontal brushstrokes across the canvas.
When I created 'The Time has Come' I was unknowingly at the start of a painful chapter of growth in my life. Pinks and purples are associated with children's toys and fun for me, but the pains of growing we experience in childhood are anything but fun. When I look at 'The Time has Come' I see my naïve hopefulness in a beautiful future that became a bitter struggle in a fight to unshackle myself from old thought patterns.
Water and a stylized form of natural elements run through her paintings and drawings. Growing up in South Florida, where the ocean is never more than a short drive away, and the rain falls like hail, water is a frequent theme in her paintings, drawings, and photography. In her photographs, she searches for landscapes that strike interest and focus on capturing the inherent romanticism of that environment to draw out a feeling of loneliness and nostalgia. Ashley’s photographs utilize natural light and work for angles that make the most of the natural light in the landscape.
I've always longed to live somewhere else, and my photographs like 'Beauty Mundane' are my way of soothing that desire to be elsewhere by finding the beauty in the mundaneness of my current environment.
“In paintings, I create visual texture and experiment with techniques to test their effects.”
I love staring at the sky; when I was a child, I would lay in the grass and pretend I could fall into the sky. And so when I look at sunsets now, I see a door to another world closing. 'End of the Line' was my attempt to capture that feeling I get when I look at a sunset, to make the viewer see the last glimpse of that portal to the world in the sky.
For a long time, art remained a fun indulgence for Ashley. Something that brought her serenity amidst her mental and emotional turmoil as she struggled with anxiety and depression. Stories were her entrance into the world of art; she was a historian long before she considered herself an artist, and dedicated her college and graduate studies to history and literature. She studied the lives and time periods of historical artists long before she studied the art itself (the work of the Impressionists is her chief artistic influence).
I've always lived close to the sea, but the sea I'm familiar with is a hard-edged blanket of turquoise that makes me feel far away from the place I dreamed about. I live in Florida, the Sunshine State that seems like a paradise to visitors but has always felt confining to me, a barrier to my dreams. 'Hope Before the Sea' was taken in Rhode Island, the first time I felt hope when I looked at the ocean.
Art was for artists, she explains. But she couldn’t shake the itch to create or the tendency to see the color and beauty in even the most mundane aspects of the visual world. As an artist, Ashley creates for herself first and sets no expectations for perfection in it.
I created 'Fragments of Blue' about ten years ago, at a time when I used collage to escape the exhaustions of "real life" and soothe my weariness with labor. Water and the color blue are frequent themes in my work, I see peace and comfort in blue, and water is the element that brings life and restores it. Even ten years on, 'Fragments of Blue' still evokes that serenity and comfort I needed.