Catriona Jeffries

Wandering, collecting, and recycling are core elements in Ashes Withyman’s work, which is an open-ended pilgrimage to the wondrous world of disregarded things. Humble exercises in economics, his works subversively examine habits of consumerism and the concept of recycling. A visual hunter-gatherer and storyteller, Withyman sets up a vague time-space frame in which to look out for discarded items that can be salvaged, transformed, and poetically reused. His methodology is often site-specific, process oriented, and “lived in.” Though his sculptures and installations always have a performative aspect, the line between performance and real life often blurs. especially when a project goes on for a long time. In St. George Marsh (2005–06), he ran a small corner shop-cum-museum in Vancouver together with collaborator Jake Gleeson. It sold an eclectic mix of items, from exotic sodas to sticks and rocks and broken media equipment, while also providing free books and displaying things that were not for sale.

For Uncertain Pilgrimage (2006-07), Withyman embarked on a one-year journey through Europe and North America without a predetermined route, during which he fabricated a loose narrative of peripheral encounters. The intention was “to visit and investigate the ensuing actions with a number of places, objects and people in an attempt to write  a kind of sculptural story.” The physical outcome of the connections he made along the way included texts, drawings, videos, and photographs, as well as sculptures and makeshift tools fashioned from found objects and natural things—some of which could be used, or have been used, like the custom-made wool suit that he wore throughout the journey, others apparently picked simply for the beauty of encounter, like the objects in Lautréamont’s Surrealist “chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.”

For dOCUMENTA (13), Withyman has been working on and living in a new outdoor installation since spring 2010. lnspired by the durational assemblages of artists such as Noah Purifoy, Kurt Schwitters, and Maud Lewis, he claimed a remote spot in the maintenance compound of Kassel’s Karlsaue park, where he has built a shed from discarded material that he found or acquired—for instance, two windows from the Brothers Grimm Museum, one of the few remaining historic buildings in Kassel, which was renovated during that time, and siding from an old washing machine dumped in the park. Using the shed as his temporary home and studio, Withyman continually extends and transforms the installation with various self-sustaining activities, slowly adding outbuildings and sculptural forms. Open to visitors to engage and interact with, the work is a public–private environment in flux, a microcosmos of intermingling narratives.

Documentation by Rosa Maria Rühling and Nils Klinger.