Moonlight rivers and celestial skies inspire Freo artist Kelsey Ashe’s new exhibition

Fremantle artist Kelsey Ashe is having a milestone year - literally and artistically - as she celebrates receiving two awards in a prestigious national art prize and the public reveal of her latest moonlit artworks.

The screenprinter was selected as a finalist in Hadley’s Art Prize this year for her work Bunuru Nocturne. Its sister piece is now the signature work for her most ambition exhibition to date. The Sun at Midnight officially opens at Linton & Kay Galleries at Cottesloe tonight (Thursday, September 3).

Ashe has created 20 large-scale, highly layered wax reduction screenprints for the exhibition over the past 12 months based on a huge array of photos and drawings done at favourite places in Fremantle, Cottesloe, the Perth Hills and Albany.

They were envisioned from 12 outings she scheduled into the WA landscape that were lined up with different events on the celestial calendar, such as solstices, equinoxes, asteroids, full moons and the Venus and Jupiter conjunction.

Most were observed around East Fremantle, Fremantle and Cottesloe. Many were familiar and favourite places for family outings, but sometimes she would just head off into the environment “under my own steam”, she said.

From that rich sources of images, Ashe started exploring the mysterious space between light and shadow, “where landscape, sky, myth, cosmology and inner experience intertwine, dissolving into one another”.

“Familiar places become mysterious. Shadows behave differently, colours dissolve, and you begin to notice things that daylight hides. My work sits somewhere between observation and imagination, where landscape, mythology and astronomy quietly converge.”

Ashe builds her intricate prints using botanical inks she makes from natural tinctures, which are photo-luminescent and glow at night-time. She uses layers of pigments, hand-cut stencils and automatic mark-making.

At tonight’s opening night, some works will be viewed under ultraviolet light to reveal the luminous layers that remain invisible during the day - inviting visitors to experience the exhibition in an entirely different way.

While screenprinting traditionally uses very exacting technique, Ashe said over her 30-year career she had deliberately moved to bring chance into her prints by disrupting the work with overprinting or by scattering pigments through it.

“It’s all made from plants and minerals and there’s a lot of texture and a lot of layers,” she said.

“The botanical inks are translucent and they build pigment and depth with each layer of screen print. Some of them have up to 20 layers. I end up with a very velvety textural surface, rather than a flat, plastic traditional screen print look.

“They are very soft and natural, so they’re lovely to live with because it’s all very non-toxic. They all have natural, muted tones.”

The Sun at Midnight explores some of WA’s most beautiful coastlines, forests, rivers and waterfalls under an extraordinary light, in a way that encourages the viewer to look out into the landscape and expand their horizon to contemplate a wider view of the Earth.