'Ashley Eriksmoen is a mid-career artist with a track record of breaking down disciplinary boundaries through her practice, which spans sculpture, contemporary craft and critical design and pushes furniture beyond narrow definitions and into an expanded field. Over the past decade, Ashley has been salvaging timber and appropriating discarded wood furniture to construct her works. She is a strong believer in the power of visual arts practice as a means of tackling pressing environmental and societal issues. Her work tackles environmental issues and aims to reveal the connections between natural resource use, consumer waste, deforestation and wildlife habitat reductions, with current works specifically focussed on native birds and loss of nesting hollows. Her work is exhibited in Australia and internationally, and she has undertaken artist residencies in USA, Australia, Thailand and Norway. In 2019, Ashley’s work was curated into the landmark international exhibit Making a Seat at the Table: Women Transform Woodworking featuring the women who have been at the forefront of the studio craft movement in wood, and in 2021 she won the prestigious Clarence Prize for excellence in furniture design. Ashley lives and works in Canberra, where she has been teaching at the Australian National University School of Art & Design since 2012.' (AXON: Creative Explorations 11.2 )
