Ashley Snook
Dr. Ashley Snook is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator whose practice spans drawing, sculpture, and immersive installation. Born in rural Northern Ontario and based in Tkaronto, she holds a PhD in Art and Visual Culture and investigates the entangled relationships between humans, nonhuman animals, plants, fungi, and microorganisms.
Her work examines and reconfigures boundaries between species, living and nonliving, human and more-than-human, inviting audiences to reflect on their position within interconnected life networks. Drawing remains the core of her practice, functioning as both observation and speculation, a method for tracing patterns, interdependencies, and flows of life. Informed by scientific research and ritualized practices rooted in green witch magic, Snook integrates organic and ephemeral materials to attune to cycles of growth, decay, and renewal, fostering relational awareness that extends beyond the human.
Through multisensory, participatory experiences, her installations incorporate touch, sound, scent, and movement, creating immersive environments that spark curiosity, reflection, and playful engagement. Recognized for research-creation projects that reimagine relationality and ecological responsibility, Snook challenges hegemonic systems, including capitalism, overwork, and environmental degradation, while opening imaginative spaces for connection, presence, and wonder.
As an educator and advocate, she cultivates accessible and inclusive arts practices, encouraging audiences to reconsider human and ecological relationships. Her work is rigorous, thoughtful, and alive, a convergence of drawing, research, ritual, and radical imagination.
Artist Statement
I make sense of the world by creating. My work explores the entangled networks of humans, animals, plants, fungi, and microorganisms, tracing cycles of transformation, decay, and renewal. Drawing, sculpture, and installation are all approaches I use to investigate these processes, but the medium is always secondary to the questions I pursue: how do life and death, difference and interdependence, shape our experience of the more-than-human world?
Animality is a central lens through which I consider relationality, impermanence, and ecological cycles. I work with organic and ephemeral materials, attuning to composting, regeneration, and the constant flux of living systems. My process blends scientific research, intuitive observation, and green witch practices, creating works that reflect both empirical and embodied understandings of the natural world.
The work often unfolds in ways that invite bodily and sensory participation. Visitors might move through, touch, listen, or smell, encouraging reflection and playful curiosity. By collapsing distinctions between species, life forms, and material states, the work opens spaces to experience cycles of decay and renewal as active, shared processes.
At its core, my practice challenges hegemonic systems, capitalism, overwork, and environmental degradation, while opening imaginative spaces that honor impermanence, interconnection, and transformation. It is both meditation and provocation: alive, tactile, and participatory. By emphasizing cycles rather than fixed forms, I explore how art can illuminate, inhabit, and reimagine our place within the ever-changing networks of life.
https://www.ashleysnook.com
