Creativity from a liberatory mindset | interview with Ashley Trabue
chaos, kindness, queerness, oh my!
Multipassionate, expansive, world-building artist ashley trabue has done us the great honour of answering some of our starter questions. Prepare to be inspired, delighted, and expanded! I won’t bother with more ado—take it away, Ashley.
What’s your relationship with the word “chaos” in art?
I think of creativity as a collaboration with the unknown, and chaos, I think, is another word for what’s unknown or uncontrollable.
With all my work, but my abstract paintings especially, I usually begin with only a very loose concept of structure or composition. Instead, my aim is to descend into chaos as quickly as possible, and from there, to make a game of finding my way back to order.
Sometimes, the piece becomes too orderly, too rigid, so then I tip it back over into chaos. I’m always wanting to strike that balance of openness and planning. Control and chaos! Creating anything is a dance between the two!
Which piece of art (poem, painting, film, song, whatever) changed your brain forever?
When I first saw Around the Clock with Red by Helen Frankenthaler at the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga it held me in a way a painting never had before. I could feel it at the base of my throat – a rooted sensation stretching down into my shoulders and chest. It was awe-inspiring.
I was so drawn in by its expanse and its surface-level simplicity. Just huge pours of pinks and reds and whites. I felt so moved! I mean, it literally moved me – I came in close and then stepped way, way, back. I wanted to see it from all the different angles.
Why had I never allowed myself the delight of basking in huge swathes of color without needing to fold in endless details and complexities?! Isn’t there something bold and wonderful about simply letting colors and marks speak on their own behalf? It has directly informed so many paintings and images I’ve made since.
I traveled to visit that painting in person on more than one occasion while living in the south. Since leaving, I now have a knack for traveling places that just so happen to have Frankenthaler exhibitions on display. Every time I see one of her large-scale pieces, it unhinges something in me. I feel feral and wonder-struck. I’m a better artist and human because her work exists.
What do you do when you feel creatively blocked?
I don’t know that I ever really feel creatively blocked these days. There are times, however, when the flow around a specific piece or project feels congested and my creative shifts course. I feel it in my body and mind, and that, for me, signals a need for either rest or “going off subject.”
That looks like giving myself explicit, abundant permission to not work on the piece or project. I take long walks in nature. I read furiously. I watch good movies or shitty TV shows without shame. I have hours-long phone dates with friends and eat good food – usually that someone else has prepared. I scroll until I’m sick of it, and then I turn all my devices off and stare at the wall. When I go without screens, I carry a notebook with me and write down thoughts and ideas obsessively.
I work on other creative endeavors where the flow feels natural – collages, doodles, dusting off old poems for new edits. I journal and make up stupid songs with my partner and take photos whenever something beautiful catches my eye. I practice line dances and bathe until I wilt, but most of all, I trust.
I trust myself to return when I’m ready. I trust my creativity to swell up and flow again. I trust the rhythm of my being to guide me in the process. I trust everything is working as it should.
How do you know when something’s finished — or do you?
Argh! The age old struggle. I usually get a sense of completion – a sensation in my body and mind that’s akin to the last puzzle-piece locking into place. An exhale. A sense of, “alright, that’s sorted!”
Sometimes, it’s sudden and obvious. Other times, I have to practice restraint to be faithful to the call of completion – times when my monkey mind wants to chip-chip away at other areas, even though in my body, I like where we’re at.
Other times, it’s murky. “Oh, this feels about done, except…” and I can’t quite put my finger on what that exception is. In this case, I step back. I hang it up somewhere I’ll see and just live with it. I listen. Usually, I get a sense of an idea, and it’s only through acting on it and trying out possible endings that I make my way through the dark and bring the piece home to being “done.”
What’s the most ridiculous feedback you’ve ever received on your work?
A man once slid into my DMs to explain to me that the nude sketch I’d just shared on my stories for $100 was simply not worth more than $10 “for that kind of line work.” The tone was that he was simply informing me of something I hadn’t considered and would obviously want to hear.
I screenshot it (though now I cannot find it anywhere!), blocked him, and then laughed about it in my stories. The piece sold, and later, I’d go on to charge 5-10x that for “that kind of line work.”
What would your dream collaboration look like?
I really want to work with more fashion designers. I had the opportunity once in Nashville and haven’t gotten over it. Tanya Taylor is a designer in NYC who uses her paintings to inspire the clothing’s color and fabrics, and working with her would be a dream.
Same with STATE THE LABEL, a two-woman design-team out of Georgia I’ve been following for years now, whose clothing draws heavily upon arts and crafts – sometimes even painting directly onto their clothing.
My inner-teen WOULD LOVE for our art to appear in VOGUE one day – hanging in the backdrop of some fashion shoot or in a feature of me as an up and coming artist or in collaboration with some fashion house.
How does queerness, colour, play, or joy appear in your work?
My queerness shapes my worldview, and that affects the way I approach my process as well as the way I share about it. My queerness is a kind of rebellion against the status-quo – we live in a culture that’s rooted in homogeny, upheld via punishment, violence, and shame.
Relating to myself and my creativity from a liberatory mindset, one that refuses extraction and violence as much as possible, is a way of living into the kind of world I want to build.
My queerness, like my art, craves freedom and fluidity. I take on a very permissive, chaotic, and honest approach to what I create. I create what’s alive for me, what I’m drawn to, and sometimes that dovetails nicely with what I’ve created before and what others might expect of me, and other times, it diverts from that expectation wildly. Disruptively.
I’m committed to myself and my own becoming, above all, and I aim to be honest about what that transmission is. That aligns with queerness both in terms of my sexuality and gender, not quite fitting into a box but being much more fluid and amorphous. It also mirrors my neurodivergence and ability to experience things in a non-linear, chaotic way. I often say I think in explosions and spiderwebs. It may look like chaos or even feel like chaos, but there’s an internal language and sensibility at work.
If your creativity were a creature, what would it look like, sound like, or demand to eat?
Aw, what comes to mind is a flying squirrel. This cute little guy, but unlike flying squirrels in the real world, which, I don’t know, I imagine eat small amounts of small things, the flying squirrel of my creativity is VORACIOUS. When she opens her mouth, she consumes everything around her. Rooms full of interesting objects. Libraries of ideas and stories and histories. Huge swathes of nature – chunks of forest, ocean, desert. The night sky.
She just opens her little mouth, and like a black hole, whoosh! Things suck in. A vortex! It may sound violent, but it’s not. Nothing is harmed. Don’t ask me the logistics – I’m just reporting what I’m told.
And then the sweet lil guy goes about her day – leaping and gliding and doing whatever the fuck flying squirrels do, and as she does, the world digests within her. She processes all she’s consumed and leaves behind a trail of little rainbow droppings – my art, my writing, my creations.
The art isn’t the point for this squirrel. It’s just part of the process of being alive.
Which genre/medium would you love to try but feel terrified of?
I want to learn how to DJ!! I just don’t have capacity at the moment to begin learning the software, but I’m going to take a class on it at some point. I keep a list in my notes app of songs that I think would be fun to blend together, and that’s been a really fun way to keep the desire alive and cared for, until I can give more time to the practice!
Imagine an art historian describing your work 100 years from now. What do you think they would say? What do you hope they would say?
I hope they would comment on my courage and willingness to evolve, experiment and follow the thread of what was alive for me rather than just sticking to one style or medium.
If you could hand the world one glitter-smeared prompt, what would it be?
What are you most terrified of being seen as?
Usually there’s something we WANT to do or create or say or be but are holding ourselves back from because we’re afraid to seem <this way>. I say: find what you’re most afraid of being, and make something (or even bolder: act in a way!) that embraces it.
For me, I’m terrified of being seen as bad or a fraud. So then to reclaim my power, I make a practice of leaning into the edges of what that fawn fears would be “bad” or “fraud-like.” Usually it’s incredibly innocuous things like raising my rates, making “shitty” art, adding a painting to my shop that feels loose and raw and alive and not over-fussed, not smiling if I don’t find a joke funny, etc. “Ahh!” my inner good-girl wails: “Is that allowed?!”
Yes, babygirl, I respond with my actions. See?
above: flowers for more child-like joy, from the BiG FEELS series (available to collect at the link)
What do you wish more people understood about experimenting with art?
That like with ANY area of your life, experimentation is not “extra” or something you do as a bonus – it is core to our development. Think about it: how many people grow up with stifled development because they were never encouraged to explore their gender or sexuality or, fuck, even just their style of dress or interests??
We live in such a homogenous culture with so much shame and violence guard-railing social norms that experimentation is seen as this almost scary, “out there” thing. If you’re experimenting “too much,” people worry about you. It’s wild because look at nature – nature is wildly prolific and iterative. Mutations and divergences are what help her to thrive! We’re no different.
If you’re not ever experimenting, you’re stifling your growth. Experimentation and growth go hand and hand, and it’s not even something you need to seek out. Your desire and urge to experiment is, like nature, already present within you. You don’t have to perform it. You only have to start noticing where you’re already feeling the tug of curiosity, but then quickly talking yourself out of it, quieting it, repressing or ignoring it.
Now, this is important: notice it with curiosity and care. Not to immediately change but just to practice seeing that original desire as well as the way you respond to it. Like I said, our culture is violent and punishing toward what’s different or divergent – it makes sense you’ve developed this safety-seeking response to avoid!
Be kind to that protective filtering part of you, but do notice it. Slowly but surely, you’ll find yourself needing it less and less, and becoming more and more curious about the ways you’re drawn to experiment and explore.
Imagine your work as a flavour of MoodMilk. What colour is it? How does it taste?
It is a soft milky pink with flecks of deep dark magenta. It tastes like if Strawberry Pocky were homemade with fresh-picked strawberries. You must drink it with a red and white striped straw.
we wouldn’t dream of drinking the ashley moodmilk with any other colour straw.
see more of ashley’s art and find ways to connect through their website:
thank you ashley for the interview, and thank you reader for reading! maybe next time you’re the one being interviewed?!
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