Ashley Perry

Ashley Perry is an interdisciplinary Goenpul artist from Quandamooka country.
His recent works come from research into Quandamooka cultural practices, focusing on material culture held in museum, university and private collections. This research is used to produce works that uncover and question the discrepancies embedded in these archives. Drawn from a number of sources from firsthand accounts to historical documents, these varied and often differing accounts are interrogated, compared and are used to produce the works. The works enter a dialogue, questioning the certainty around some of these accounts and engaging in a speculative potential. He is interested in decolonising theories as a way of understanding materials, histories, and artistic practice and examining knowledge structures and methods around collections.
Perry works across sculpture, drawing, printmaking and new media utilising a wide variety of materials, from traditional processes such as copperplate etching to more contemporary such as .html programming. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Art in Sculpture and Spatial Practice with honours at the Victorian College of the Arts. Perry has exhibited across Melbourne in galleries including Margaret Lawrence Gallery, West Space, Incinerator Gallery, and the McClelland Gallery & Sculpture Park. He recently presented work in Florence, Italy for the First Commissions Project, the University of Melbourne. He was the recipient of the Mary and Lou Senini Prize in sculpture (2017) and the Fiona Myer Award (2017). in the In 2017, Ashley was awarded an exchange to the Indonesian Institute of the Arts, Yogyakarta as a part of the New Colombo Plan scholarship.