06.09 - 01.11.2025

Jessica Ashman:

Chimera Island

Modern Painters, New Decorators opened the doors to its new purpose-built arts venue with ‘Chimera Island’, a solo exhibition by artist Jessica Ashman. The show launched on Saturday 6 September 2025 as part of a special daytime celebration marking the Grand Opening of the new space in Aumberry Gap, Loughborough.

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Ashman’s immersive installation reimagined landscapes as sites of resistance, refuge, and radical re-connection. Working across textiles, animation, sound, and natural dyeing, ‘Chimera Island’ explored how colonial histories echo through rural and ecological spaces — and how those same spaces might be reimagined through a speculative, restorative lens rooted in personal and ancestral experience. The exhibition centred on an imagined island — a hybrid space drawing from landscape research and folklore. Ashman wove together references to Brazil Island in Leicestershire (a renamed islet in Swithland Reservoir), the legend of Hy-Brasil — a phantom island from Irish mythology — and the history of Brazilwood, a dyewood traded through the violent labour of the Indigenous Tupí people under Portuguese colonial rule. Out of these entangled legacies, Ashman conjured ‘Chimera Island’: a speculative refuge shaped by her Jamaican Black British heritage — a space to consider belonging beyond empire.

At the heart of the exhibition was a new large-scale textile installation in vivid pinks and magentas, dyed using Brazilwood and Logwood — materials historically linked to colonial trade and extraction. The works unfolded like exploded storyboards: layered scenes and characters suspended in space, echoing the visual language of multiplane animation. Ashman created tactile, synaesthetic installations that wove together silk painting, sound, and hand-drawn animation — a visual meditation on identity, resistance, and the possibility of reimagining place.

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Jessica Ashman is a Jamaican Black British artist working across animation, sound, drawing, textiles, and installation. She has exhibited at venues including New Art Exchange, Focal Point Gallery, and 198 Contemporary, and in 2025 presented a major commissioned installation, ‘Those That Do Not Smile Will Kill Me’, at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery as part of UAL’s 20/20 Decolonising Arts Institute programme. This exhibition was supported by Arts Council England and Studio Atta Kwami.