Claire Helen Ashley
Claire Helen Ashley has been teaching at SAIC since 2000. She took her sabbatical during the Spring 2024.
Scottish born, Chicago-based artist Claire Helen Ashley mines the language of painterly abstraction, monumental sculpture, and slapstick humor to investigate inflatables as painting, sculpture, installation and performance costume.
These works have been exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries, museums, site-specific installations, performances and collaborations such as the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, UK, Beacon Arts Center, Scotland, the Louis Kahn Library at Phillips Exeter Academy, NH, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AR, among many others. Her work has been featured on blogs such as Studio International, VICE, Hyperallergic, and Artforum, and in magazines such as Sculpture Magazine, Art Papers, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Time Out Chicago, Yorkshire Post, and Condé Nast Traveller (European).
Ashley received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL), and her BFA from Gray’s School of Art (Aberdeen, Scotland). Currently, she teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Department of Contemporary Practices and the Department of Painting and Drawing. She lives in the cornfields of Illinois with her old husband, and a menagerie of pets. Her three offspring have flown the coop.
At SAIC:
Full Professor, Adjunct 2000 – 2025
Director of Betty Rymer Gallery (staff), 1995 – 2000
Education
1995 MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
BFA, Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, Scotland
Notable Classes Taught:
Painting Studio B: Exploding Paint – taught each Fall semester since 2016
Using an irreverent love of painting and an absurdly oedipal desire to destroy it, this class looks at ways to create fantastical, hybridized, bastardized offspring “paintings” in the expanded field (and in a play on words, the expanded field of your environment). We will connect painterly gestures with non-traditional surfaces such as a literal field, sidewalk, neighborhood, and landscape of your environment, modular, flat-pack, and portable sculptural form, found objects, architectural space, virtual space, video projection, performative action, and the body.
Core Studio Chromatic Sequence color projects, co-taught with Rebecca Beachy and Benji Melamed
Readings: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1yc1KTo2m4229AHNryyDFRNP6qF2sezto
