Ashley Stefano is an interdisciplinary artist, based in Glasgow. They engage in a performative practice to create experiential works based in sound, video, live performance, and sculptural installation. Ashley uses the body as a research tool, informed by yoga and breathwork practices and a background in musical theatre. They employ writing as a cathartic method to divine visual and linguistic motifs that saturate a synaesthetic understanding of emotions, dreams, relationships, memory, and empathy. Ashley’s research is heavily influenced by psycho/spiritual analyses of healing processes, biblical and mythical references, embodied knowledge, and feminist and queer theory.

For the degree show, Ashley has exhibited a selection of two works from an on-going extended project, titled An Archaeologist I am Destined to Be. These include a sculptural installation in the Stow building and screenings of a short film in the Reid Lecture Theatre.

An Archaeologist I am Destined to Be grapples with the entanglement of the beauty and harshness of queer becoming, the shedding of shame, the opening of vulnerability and the cycles of death and rebirth inherent to this process. Over the span of a year and a half, Ashley has produced a number of video and sound pieces, poetic writing, live performances (Bury the Bed I-III), sculptural installations and a short film (D’ear’th Bed). In these works, Ashley initiates opportunities for ceremonial and meditative contemplation of the bed as site, where gesture functions as both a form of self-soothing and a way to activate sculptural objects and their associated meanings. The bed becomes a womb/tomb, a ground for grieving, a portal of euphoria and lament to be unearthed and buried. D’ear’th Bed tracks the excavatory and mournful passage of the soaken character, which has formed the narrative basis for this project, accompanied by an ambient and breathy score which bubbles up from beneath the surface of the waters from which the character emerges. The sculptural installation (Bury the Bed III) was made in situ by performing the third iteration of the Bury the Bed live works and lies amongst Gwendolin Kircali’s gravestones, with whom Ashley has collaborated for the degree show install. Together, these domestic objects and outdoor structures are morphed to form an inverted cemetery of sorts.