Copper, wood and even salvaged plastic waste come together in a new art exhibition exploring the natural world at Pellissippi State Community College.
The Ashton Ludden Exhibit is on display at the Bagwell Center for Media and Arts Gallery until March 1. Gallery hours are 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, and the gallery, located on the college’s Hardin Valley Campus, is free and open to the public.
“My work considers our relationship with wildlife as the natural world becomes estranged through human’s perpetual desire for rapid expansion,” said Ludden, the founder, co-owner, director and active artist of Relay Ridge Collaborative Artist Space in north Knoxville. “My work evokes a renewal of attentiveness toward our direct and indirect impacts on the wild and aims to rejuvenate a passion for conserving wild spaces.”
Ludden uses processes such as hand-engraving, printmaking, murals, ceramics and weaving in her works on display.
The labor-intensive process forces her to slow down, meditate and focus as she creates, she said. Through her work, she works to find “ways to connect us to distant species and environmental concerns across the world, transforming our hopeful – yet seemingly futile – attempts in saving the natural world into something just as beautiful.”
Outside of her studio practice, Ludden, who earned a Master of Fine Arts in printmaking from the University of Tennessee, teaches printmaking at Knoxville’s Community School of the Arts, Governor’s School for the Arts, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts and Relay Ridge, and is currently teaching screenprinting at the University of Tennessee. You can learn more about her at www.ashtonludden.com or find her on Instagram @ashton_ludden.
For a list of Pellissippi State’s upcoming exhibitions in the Bagwell Gallery this spring, visit www.pstcc.edu/arts.
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