Ashley Middleton (*1985, USA) is an artist and researcher working in a range of media that includes photography, sculpture, and installation. Her projects are an expression of her ongoing research into the unconscious, its manifestation in human behavior, and how those behaviors produce, and alter, our physical and digital worlds. Her practice contemplates the notion of the self as a microcosm of the cosmos and the evolution of social connectivity in the age of rapid technological advancement. Ashley’s work uses philosophy, science, and empirical research to address the value of the body and its symbiotic relation to nature.

In Schöppingen, Ashley Middelton worked with cyanotypes to express consciousness in and through liquid form. Thinking through both individual and collective consciousness, she grouped 55 single-sheets of chemically processed copy paper and explored bodily gestures through liquid painting. The expressions on paper are a recording of time, space and movement. They are documentations of the intra-relationality between body, object, and the surrounding environment. Her body’s liquid movements, along with the sun, wind, and earth, affected the final exposure of the work. Ashley’s choice to display the shadowy-side was an intention to bring light to the beauty of the dark, unknown, and unconscious.