Lily Ashrowan

A ritual evocation set on Dartmoor, through stone and water, the senses unfolding, drawing inward, and creating. The inner life embodied and manifesting as divine play, the Lila of Hindu philosophy, the Lila who was my teacher, now reaching down through the ancestral line in father and daughter.

In Garment/Movement, Lily Ashrowan explores space, physical response and time. Ashrowan depicts two women playing and performing amongst industrial debris, likening human arms and non-human levers in Hawick’s derelict Peter Scott mill, a site imbued with the past labour of women. A tense countdown booms out as the site’s discarded present is explored through the female body and entrancing gestures of the passing of time. Ashrowan challenges notions of play as simply jovial or as pastime, and fixes it firmly in real human experience, a method to understand the world.