Ash Pure

Ash Pure is artist and artwork - the originary symbol in the practice; a conceptual persona in a tradition stretching from Duchamp's Rrose Sélavy to Bowie's Ziggy Stardust, and beyond - except here the ‘fiction suit’ is permanent, if fluid and the work flows from it.

Working at the intersection of semiotics, street art and ritual performance, the artist builds large-scale mixed media works from the discarded material of everyday culture - newsprint collected from commuter trains, exposed to weather, layered and worked by hand - onto which purposefully generated, precisely configured vector symbol systems of the artists own design are applied in the paste-up tradition of street art.

The result sits between the conceptual rigour of Joseph Kosuth, the visual language of sacred geometry, and the raw material politics of Arte Povera - without belonging to any of them. Rather the work is described as a 'liberation technology', working in pure meaning, beyond language.

Self-directed practice spanning 25 years across East London, Brooklyn, Berlin and most recently the Kent Coast between Margate and Ramsgate. Informed by semiotics, systems thinking, sacred geometry, street art culture, depth psychology, artivism and therapeutic practice.

2001 - Group exhibition, The Foundry, Shoreditch, London
2002 - BRKDWN high frequency soul performance and projections, London
2003 - Formication - exhibition and performance, Public Life, Whitechapel, London
2004 - Spoken word performance residency, The Black & White Bar, 86 East 10th Street, New York
2011 - Welcome to Thamesis - solo exhibition and immersive performance, Shoreditch Town Hall, London. Guests entered a living transmedia narrative set in an alternate London.
2015 - O U T S I D E - ritual performance and book launch, Topics, Berlin
2024 - KRZ WRK - joint exhibition, BcmA, Berlin
2024 - Art Margate - Group exhibition at the Margate School of Art
2025 - MRGT WRK - solo exhibition, Salon Gallery, Margate