Current: Bird Hut Sperm Bank, hour-long serious comedy premiering at Calm Down Dear Festival, Camden People's Theatre 7.15pm, 7th June 2022. "Childless 39 year old artist Louise Ashcroft is building a DIY sperm bank outside her home, to reflect on who gets to have kids, who doesn't, and how we might reinvent family for 2022. Fashioned from an old bird hut, this 'open sauce' gene-vault is designed to bring her closer to her neighbours and to annoy her child-hesitant girlfriend. Part joke, part public tantrum about the reproductive industry and the prohibitive cost of sperm; Louise's bird hut sperm bank is a comical meditation on her own reproductive challenges and ambivalence, which explores histories and futures of doing family differently. In an era of tech bros minting their own genomes as NFTs, and biohackers making dogs glow in the dark, what does it mean to spread your seed? Ancestry.com owns our genetic weaknesses, Mutual Aid has been eaten by instant grocery apps, and the word 'homeschooling' needs a trigger warning. Are there better ways we could share the privileges and responsibilities of care, post-pandemic? The clock is ticking... help Louise reimagine the future of family, before Silicon Valley invents the on demand Uber-Mom."
Click photos below for information on selected works.
Louise Ashcroft's performances, comedy, videos, writing, community projects, drawings and sculptures spawn from her antagonistic fieldwork in public space, meddling with the bizarre norms of capitalism. She's made work for BBC Sounds, Tate Learning, Museum of London Lates, Arebyte, Bobinska Brownlee, Frans Hals Museum, Art Night London, BQ Berlin, Turf Projects, Duckie, Deptford X Special Project, Salisbury Art Centre, Coastal Currents Festival, TEDx Hackney, Wellcome Lates, Latitude and Supernormal Festival. She is a co-founder of London's peer led art school AltMFA (est 2010), runs the funny live art night 'Unperforming', and teaches art at Goldsmiths. Speaking fiction to power, Louise's work creates situations and stories which unravel reality and remix primary and secondary research; often deliberately misunderstanding or subverting cultural codes and disrupting systems in order to speculate alternative ways of seeing/being.
Click photos below for information on selected works.
Louise Ashcroft's performances, comedy, videos, writing, community projects, drawings and sculptures spawn from her antagonistic fieldwork in public space, meddling with the bizarre norms of capitalism. She's made work for BBC Sounds, Tate Learning, Museum of London Lates, Arebyte, Bobinska Brownlee, Frans Hals Museum, Art Night London, BQ Berlin, Turf Projects, Duckie, Deptford X Special Project, Salisbury Art Centre, Coastal Currents Festival, TEDx Hackney, Wellcome Lates, Latitude and Supernormal Festival. She is a co-founder of London's peer led art school AltMFA (est 2010), runs the funny live art night 'Unperforming', and teaches art at Goldsmiths. Speaking fiction to power, Louise's work creates situations and stories which unravel reality and remix primary and secondary research; often deliberately misunderstanding or subverting cultural codes and disrupting systems in order to speculate alternative ways of seeing/being.
