Please note that most files on this page are password protected. You may contact Robin Ashworth directly for access to these files.
Pop Shop Chop & Drop
This project represents the culmination of my study of technotopias (utopian and dystopian), exploring specifically biotechnology and nanotechnology at the intersection of social ideology, medical research and fictional narrative. As an interdisciplinary project, my work combines research in popular culture, technological science, medicine, literature and television.
Harold Bloom Meets Harold Crick
in the Cathedral of the Imagination
A few years ago, on a summer trip to Barcelona, I visited, among many other places, Gaudi's Sagrada Familia, a century old cathedral still under construction. The many facets of this massive structure haunted me, and left, perhaps, the most lasting impression in my mind of my time in that city.
After reading Camille's "Image on the Edge," and viewing "Stranger Than Fiction" (a film whose protagonist discovers he is a character in someone else's novel, and wants to take control of his own narrative), I knew I wanted to explore the notion of multiple authors/designers as they apply to literature and the architecture of the unfinished cathedral. I loved revisiting Sagrada Familia, if only digitally, and equally enjoyed bearing witness to Harold Crick's declaration of narrative autonomy. In both media, authorship is decidedly a shifting, forward-moving process; in both media, the narrative outcome is still being written.
Monster Quilts & Needle Narratives
"Inherent in the text of feminist discourse is the irony of “center”; practically speaking, finding the center of anything is a spatial, geometric, often mathematical exercise, and expert quilting relies fundamentally on measured precision in cuts, seaming, shapes and geometric harmony. But textually and analytically speaking, the center is the place where the text tears and breaks up… where fabric/text shows its greatest potential to become pieced and stitched and bound again."
This project explores Shelley Jackson's "Patchwork Girl" and hypertext as a metaphor for quilting (and vice versa); but the study expands and culminates in a cultural reading of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, whose construction is vast, worldwide, and represents the careful piecing of individual, human stories into a narrative pattern. My academic study is interspersed with pieces of a creative, non-fiction narrative, which tells the story of a communally pieced baby quilt.
Bullfighting, Art & the Theater of Totality
A recent visit to Mexico, which included tickets to a local bullfight, helped to inspire this project. I cannot explain my near obsession in exploring this bloodsport, but as a cultural spectacle, it made a very interesting comparative study with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's concept of the Theater of Totality. As an interdisciplinary project, it combines cultural ritual, theater, history, literature, fine art, and an allusion to film. The project is under revision, but appears here in its original form.
Playing the Narrative Game (Interactive Fiction)
Alan Liu visited, layed down the "laws of cool," and left me with a notion.
Conversations with the "Original Self"
Identity has emerged in my explorations as a cross-disciplinary theme, particularly among visual media, and narrative expression. The artist book, a unique, hybrid artform combining these media, is at the center of this project, drawing specific attention to process, construction, authorship and object. The result is a close, analytical reading of an artist's personal statement about self through text, self-portrait and devore printing. Though I haven't yet created my own artist book, I fully expect to..... that has been one of the inspirations of this project.
Simulacra, Seduction & the Dream of Being Human
Identity and the double, specifically conceived as a digital or hyperreal construct, drives this exploration of Baudrillard's theories of simulacra and truth, and Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris." The project crosses disciplines in that it explores philosophy, literature and film; the project ultimately reaches beyond the scope of Lem's story to explore Jung's Animus as an embedded identity concept realized in the (re)instantiation of Rheya.
Narrative Multiplicity & the Story We Want to be Told
"The French Lieutenant's Woman," with its multiple narrative endings, lent itself well to a film version which explored yet another narrative concerning the "real-life" actors (Mike and Anna) portraying the characters of Charles and Sarah. This project explores issues of character determinism, as well as the fourth narrative ending created by the film; additionally, the project analyzes the narrative tensions created by the intersection of text and film.
Regard the Wunderkammen:
Taxidermy as Art-Process-Object
An exploration of Thanatopias led me to a peripheral consideration of Egyptian embalming practices, which included some of the earliest forms of taxidermy, developed to enable the placement of lucky or valued animals in the tombs of Egyptian nobility.
Contemporary taxidermists regard the practice as an art form whose best examples simulate life both in appearance and articulation. Avant-garde interpretations combine body parts of various animals to create whimsical, "new" breeds, or to make specific cultural and artistic statements.
This study combines history, process, cultural value and contemporary art, culminating in the artistic consideration of plastination, an extraordinary method used to preserve the human body.
McGuffey: Text + Art = Pedagogy
When I was a child, my father gave me a set of McGuffey's Readers, because he remembered them from his own childhood, and valued them as a reading tool. I read every one, and saved that set, which I later shared with my daughter. So interest in the series runs in my family.
This is a project I fully intend to revisit in my post-doctoral life. Though perhaps not an artform in and of itself, McGuffey's design concept relied fundamentally on the incorporation of fine art illustrations and carefully constructed page layouts.
The Human Form Divine: Text, Illustration, Score
The works of Blake comprised a great deal of my course study for a semester. His illustrated poems, which he designed and produced as etchings and engravings, forge a distinct and intentional relationship between text and image. My study explores Bolcom's musical illumination
of Blake's Songs, combining text, image and sound. Audiofiles of two compositions from Bolcom's collection follow.
Jocasta the Queen
This is my singular, dubious attempt at playwriting. My purpose in pursuing the project was to right the cultural wrong done to Jocasta, a significant woman and mother reduced to collateral damage in the wake of Oedipal reckonings. In my version, Jocasta debunks the cultural norms of Ancient Greece, and embraces single parenthood for the sake of her suffering daughters, and herself. Cover statement HERE.