The Alchemy of Landscape
For artist Kelsey Ashe, the landscape is a place of possibility, where the familiar can become strange, the everyday can feel magical and the natural world holds secrets. Through innovative printmaking and experimentation, she invites us to look again.
Words Elizabeth Clarke
Imagery Jody D'Arcy
For artist Kelsey Ashe, landscape is never just a subject. A stretch of coastal scrub, a moonlit river or the changing light across a Western Australian forest becomes a starting point for exploring memory, mythology, ecology and the unseen.
Working across printmaking, writing and performance, Kelsey has developed a deeply interdisciplinary practice concerned with what she describes as the “quiet deep calm mystery of the universe”. In Japanese aesthetic philosophy, this sense of profound beauty is known as yūgen: an appreciation of that which cannot be seen or explained but can be felt.
“I am fascinated by the mysteries of life on both a cosmic and human scale,” she says. “Moonlit rivers, southern celestial skies, forgotten stories, ritual practices, and the hidden energies of place become starting points for works that move between observation and dream.”
In the Orbit of the Year
The dialogue between the visible and the unseen lies at the heart of Kelsey’s latest body of work, The Sun at Midnight, created over 12 months for her exhibition with Linton & Kay Galleries in Cottesloe.
The project began with a calendar, but not one measured in weeks and months. Kelsey marked the year through equinoxes and solstices, full moons and celestial events, allowing the flow of the natural world to determine where and when she would work.
From Cottesloe Beach to Albany, she travelled with sketchbooks and materials, observing the angle of the sun, the movement of water, the density of foliage, the colour of earth, and the atmosphere of a particular hour.
Her field trips resulted in atmospheric screen prints that lie between representation and imagination. They suggest geological forms, capturing not so much the landscape itself as her experience of being in it.
The Alchemy of Earth and Ink
Kelsey’s process is as important as the finished image. A print begins as a wax drawing made on site before being enlarged onto a silk screen and built up through multiple layers of natural pigment. Indigo, turmeric, chlorophyll and myrolaban – a traditional brown dye made from the fruit of the Terminalia chebula tree – are among the materials she uses, alongside rare earth photoluminescent pigments that absorb natural UV light during the day and reveal hidden luminous layers after dark.
Like the landscapes that inspire them, these elements remain unseen in daylight, emerging only as the surrounding light fades. She also embraces imperfection in the process. Salt is scattered into wet pigment to create texture, while accidental marks and misregistered prints are often retained.
“I like that wabi-sabi aesthetic of perfect imperfection,” she says. “I don’t try to fix things.”
I’m always imagining new projects, and new worlds.
— Kelsey Ashe
The More-Than-Human World
Kelsey’s prints retain the rawness of the Western Australian landscape while transforming it through colour, texture and process. Her practice draws on eco-poetics, feminist surrealism, folklore, mysticism and environmental philosophy, exploring the relationship between people and the natural world.
With a PhD in Art and an internationally recognised practice-led research methodology, Kelsey is interested in how we experience place – what stories become attached to landscapes, what memories they hold and what remains beyond the visible.
Where Stories Take Root
Kelsey’s practice does not end at the edge of the image. She is also a writer, creating novellas that she describes as adult fairy tales – imagined worlds in which landscape and folklore, mystery and the uncanny can exist side by side. Her previous exhibition, The Deep Green Sea, was accompanied by a novella of the same name, creating a conversation between the visual and written worlds.
“I do this oscillating thing, where I’ll make a body of work, and then I might write some short stories,” she explains. “I’m always imagining new projects, and new worlds.”
Returning to the Beginning
Next year, Kelsey returns to Tasmania, where she grew up, for a month-long residency following her selection as a finalist and double award winner in the prestigious 2026 Hadley’s Art Prize. This experience will provide another opportunity for field research, writing and making, and a chance to reconnect with a landscape that has shaped her from an early age.
For Kelsey, the landscape remains both subject and source – a place to observe, question and return to, with each new project offering another way of understanding the world around us.
Have you read?
