Aasha John: Artist and Educator
A practice deeply rooted in the relationship between art, education and community building.
About
Aasha John is a London-based artist and educator whose practice is rooted in storytelling and community. Exploring her relationship with places, often through collaborative or participatory practices, John invites the viewer to physically engage with her artwork and share her experiences, in turn contributing to the artwork themselves. She is interested in the artist's role as investigator and interpreter; probing their subject and conveying meaning in a way that engages the viewer and invites them to consider their relationship with the subject matter.
John’s wider practice is deeply rooted in the relationship between art, education and community building. With 13 years experience in secondary art education, her classroom, like the gallery or artist studio, is a space in which the community come together to exchange and challenge ideas, share ways of making and articulate through process.
As I Weave
‘As I Weave’ captures conversations with family, confrontations with distance, the passing of time and loss of connection. Each individual weaving is a story in itself; an exploration of time, identity and memory across the diaspora. Often fragmented and incomplete, the friction of the thread holds each generation together, resisting loss over time and space.
In ‘As I Weave’ weaving acts as both connection and preservation, confronting the distance and disconnect in my understanding of my family, fractured by migration and time. I take this familial material and hold it tight, clasping each memory together to make something whole. Created using my family archive, ‘As I Weave’ is a physical embodiment of oral history, each piece born from deep listening as my family share memories and stories. These weavings are a culmination of collective and personal experiences; shared culture and heritage, physical and emotional journeys as well as hopes for our future.
This body of work has been created during the Visible Practice Residency at Autograph Gallery.
Artist Residency - Autograph Gallery
Aasha John is the second resident artist for Autograph’s Visible Practice Residency, a three-year project supporting Artist Teachers from global majority backgrounds in arts education. This residency provides an opportunity to create new work within and beyond the school environment, showcasing the value of Artist Teachers and new approaches to practice in teaching.
During her residency, John has developed a new body of work that explores craft as a form of resistance. Working with woven photographs as a site for holding memories and stories, she approaches making as a way of preserving culture and connection. Drawing on family archives and histories, she reclaims, remakes and reimagines relationships with the past confronting distance and disconnection and using archival materials as prompts for critical and reflective dialogue.
Lingering in process, John embraces the intricate, repetitive rituals of making as acts of connection and reflection. The continuity of weaving becomes a means of commemorating moments of closeness and making tangible the relationships that stretch across time and place. Her practice meaningfully informs her approach to teaching, encouraging her students to undertake the role of investigator and interpreter in the creation of engaging work.
As I Weave
Autograph Gallery, 3-6 June 2026
Curated by Jolie Hockings
I wanted to make work that confronted the distance and disconnect in my understanding of my family, fractured by migration and time. Using oral history, my family archive and imagination, my intention was to make solid these ephemera and build my world from collective memory. I see weaving as a physical representation of my connecting these lived experiences and shared memories, I see weaving as preservation. Warp thread forces proximity, trapping these stories and memories into narrative – fragments of memory made whole.
Jo Anne i, ii, iii 2026
Each weaving was made in response to a conversation with a family member. I had visited my mother to collect some more photographs, fabric and clothing to use in the next iteration of my work. She began to tell me about the memories attached to each piece of clothing; the care put into preserving them, the deftness of my grandmother's fingers as she created each item from her wedding dress, each motif in the reticella lace carved carefully into the delicate fabric, the crochet links still holding together fond memories of childhood. Each individual piece a story in itself, the friction of the threads holding each generation together and resisting being lost over time and distance. There is continuity in the fabric; we make dresses to mark occasions, we turn these dresses into something new for our family, we turn fabric into ritual and artefact. The memory becomes artefact through care.
Jo Anne and Robert i, ii 2026
As the project progressed, pieces were constructed with more care, made to hold together tightly the memories in the photographs and the histories in the stories I had heard from my family. I listened back to the recordings and selected the photographs that best represented the conversation. I then spent some time with the images, thinking about what I wanted to show, what I wanted to hide, thinking of this process as another form of archival practice.
Each strip was measured and cut by hand and fed into the loom, carefully alternating between the paper and the yarn to create a strong form. I wanted these pieces to show how I had gathered these memories and held them tight, clasping them together to make something whole. This exploration of time, identity and memory across generations, across the diaspora, presented in these woven pieces so complete yet still clearly made up of fragments.
Leon and Jamaal i, ii, iii 2026
When I invited my brothers to participate, we did this via video call; the physical disconnect, although at odds with what I have been exploring in my work, made the act of reflecting, speaking and listening less frightening. As before with the conversation I had with my mother, I asked them to share any thoughts, feelings or memories associated with the photographs, and to reflect on the impact physical distance and time made on their connection to these memories. Their recollection varied, whether based on age difference, emotional connection or what they held close as important we could not discern, but I listened as they spoke of the childhood they had in Trinidad, their life in London and how their understanding of themselves has changed over time. We talked about the loss of our family home. We haven’t lived together, all 3 of us under the same roof, in over 20 years but all consider the day my mother moved into a retirement home as a moment of disconnection. Her home was where our family rituals took place; birthday and Christmas meals, where my brothers’ families grew up and where we always returned for comfort.
Robert i, ii 2026
These pieces contain a lot of empty spaces created by the block colours of fabric and the neutral backgrounds that dominate some of the photographs used. These empty spaces are intentional. There were long pauses in the recording that I wanted to capture. These pauses spoke of physical and emotional distance, of contrasts in personal experience and of deliberate reflection before articulation. This is not a conversation or artwork that reflects familiarity of sharing. I lived with my father the least of all my family, this is not to say that he was absent from my life but he came to London first to establish a home before we all moved here and he moved back to Trinidad when my brothers and I were older. In the photographs I shared with him, he spoke of his absences and the things that he missed from our lives. The thread in the weaving is taut, holding these moments close together and surrounding the pauses and empty space with memory. The warp thread preserves the history held within the weaving, resisting further separation.
