Jessica Ashman: Chimera Island

Modern Painters, New Decorators opens the doors to its new purpose-built arts venue with ‘Chimera Island’, a solo exhibition by artist Jessica Ashman. The show launches on Saturday 6 September 2025 as part of a special daytime celebration marking the Grand Opening of the new space in Aumberry Gap, Loughborough.

Ashman’s immersive new installation reimagines landscapes as sites of resistance, refuge, and radical re-connection. Working across textiles, animation, sound, and natural dyeing, ‘Chimera Island’ explores how colonial histories echo through rural and ecological spaces — and how those same spaces might be reimagined through a speculative, restorative lens rooted in personal and ancestral experience.

The exhibition centres on an imagined island — a hybrid space drawing from landscape research and folklore. Ashman weaves together references to Brazil Island in Leicestershire (a renamed islet in Swithland Reservoir), the legend of Hy-Brasil — a phantom island from Irish mythology — and the history of Brazilwood, a dyewood traded through the violent labour of the Indigenous Tupí people under Portuguese colonial rule.

Out of these entangled legacies, Ashman conjures ‘Chimera Island’: a speculative refuge shaped by her Jamaican Black British heritage — a space to consider belonging beyond empire.

At the heart of the exhibition is a new large-scale textile installation in vivid pinks and magentas, dyed using Brazilwood and Logwood — materials historically linked to colonial trade and extraction. The works unfold like exploded storyboards: layered scenes and characters suspended in space, echoing the visual language of multiplane animation. Ashman creates tactile, synaesthetic installations that weave together silk painting, sound, and hand-drawn animation — a visual meditation on identity, resistance, and the possibility of reimagining place.

Jessica Ashman is a Jamaican Black British artist working across animation, sound, drawing, textiles, and installation. She has exhibited at venues including New Art Exchange, Focal Point Gallery, and 198 Contemporary, and in 2025 presented a major commissioned installation, ‘Those That Do Not Smile Will Kill Me’, at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery as part of UAL’s 20/20 Decolonising Arts Institute programme. This exhibition is supported by Arts Council England and Studio Atta Kwami.

About the venue

Modern Painters, New Decorators is an artist-led organisation based in Loughborough, East Midlands, UK. We operate a purpose-built gallery, project space, artist studios, shop, and creative kitchen. We believe artists play a vital role in shaping the places we live and the stories we share. Through exhibitions, workshops, events, and collaborative projects, we foster creativity, community, and long-term support for artists and ideas.

Grand Opening – Saturday 6 September 2025

Join us for a special daytime celebration as we open the doors to our new venue at Aumberry Gap. After seven years at Carillon Court Shopping Centre, we’ve relocated to a permanent site that brings together exhibitions, artist studios, a shop, events, and a micro-bakery under one roof. The new space is a shared home for creativity and community — built collaboratively, shaped by local voices, and designed to support
artists and ideas long-term.

‘Chimera Island’ will be the centrepiece of the Grand Opening, alongside pop-up events, artist-led activities, and the launch of our new retail and kitchen spaces.