Artist Statement – Rachael Ashley

My work explores the fluid, layered nature of identity, femininity, and storytelling through photography. I am drawn to intimate, fantastical, and symbolic imagery, using portraiture, self-portraiture, and experimental techniques to investigate the roles and archetypes that shape our personal and collective unconscious.

In projects like Double, Double and Archetypes Within, I interrogate feminine power, transformation, and self-authorship, reimagining archetypes as living, evolving forces rather than fixed roles. I employ cinematic staging, double exposures, and abstraction to blur the boundaries between body, myth, and landscape, creating images that are intimate, unsettling, and evocative.

I am equally interested in identity in the digital age. My exploration of online personas on platforms such as Instagram examines the tension between curated self-presentation, algorithmic influence, and authentic experience, highlighting how identity becomes performative, malleable, and mediated by technology.

Alongside my personal practice, I work with Snap and Chat Connect, guiding photography sessions that foster creativity, confidence, and wellbeing. Across all my work, I am concerned with storytelling, transformation, and the spaces where identity, myth, and imagination intersect.

Double, double 2025

Degree Show exhibition; Artcore Gallery, Osnabruck Square, Derby sep 10th-29th 2025

In Double, Double, I reimagine the witch as a symbol of feminine power, transformation, and resistance. Working collaboratively with an all-female coven, I invite my subjects to embody symbolic elements, earth, air, fire, water- establishing roles that resonate with their personal energy and presence. These women are not posed as fictional characters, but as archetypal extensions of themselves. Their identities, like the witch herself, are layered, ambiguous, and fluid. 

Nature, texture, and the body become vessels for symbolic meaning in my work, blurring the line between subject and setting. The series invites viewers into a quiet, ritualistic space, where identity is fragmented, myth is reclaimed, and the witch emerges not as spectacle, but as presence. 

Influenced by feminist theory, Double, Double situates the witch as a figure of resistance against patriarchal control and capitalist systems. Historically condemned for their independence, women labelled as witches were often those who lived outside societal norms. My work reclaims this identity, offering the witch not as a threat, but as a celebration of female agency, embodied knowledge, and spiritual autonomy. 

My practice centres around in-camera double exposures and black-and-white abstraction. Forests, textures, light, and movement become central tools in my process, allowing the images to suggest the witch without directly showing her. 

Mirror Mirror in my phone 2024

Artist Statement: Constructing Online Personas in the Age of Instagram

By Rachael Ashley

In this ongoing project, I explore the creation of online identities as a tool for constructing entirely new personas on platforms like Instagram. By removing personal details and inhabiting disembodied, curated characters, I examine how identity is performed, consumed, and shaped by both culture and algorithms.

Influenced by Cindy Sherman’s approach to identity, I create faceless, archetypal personas that reflect contemporary beauty standards, societal expectations, and the pressures of social media. Using AI and editing tools, these characters embody the unsettling tension between curated perfection and authentic selfhood, highlighting how digital platforms mediate, surveil, and control our online presence.

The project also investigates the paradox of autonomy and restriction: as I construct identities, Instagram’s algorithms and moderation policies respond, revealing how art, performance, and identity are simultaneously empowered and constrained by technology.

Ultimately, this work critiques the commodification of online identity, questioning how much of ourselves we perform for validation, and what it means to exist as both creator and subject in a digital landscape.

Archetypes within 2024

Artist Statement: Reflective Processes and Visual Enquiry – Archetypes Within
By Rachael Ashley

Archetypes Within is a self-portrait series exploring the complex relationship between femininity, identity, and the archetypes that shape our collective unconscious. Drawing on Carl Jung’s theories and Joseph Campbell’s work on the Hero’s Journey, I examine the roles women play in myth, culture, and personal experience, questioning inherited narratives of femininity.

I focus on seven archetypes—The Mother, Maiden, Lover, Queen, Huntress, Mystic, and Sage—embodying each in self-portraiture. These are not fixed roles but evolving energies, stages, and expressions that shift throughout life. By becoming these figures, I explore how archetypes live within us, shaping identity while also offering space for transformation and self-authorship.

Visually, the series draws from film, mythology, and storytelling traditions. Inspired by artists like Cindy Sherman and Juno Calypso, I use cinematic staging, colour symbolism, and visual cues to evoke familiar yet unsettling narratives, inviting viewers to question how identity is constructed and consumed.

Through this work, I investigate the tension between assigned roles and chosen selves, exploring how myth, culture, and personal experience converge in the female experience. Archetypes Within is an exploration of identity, self-expression, and the transformative power of myth.