Ash Pure
- 19 hours ago
- 4 min read
After more than two decades in East London and Berlin, Ash Pure is now based in Margate on the Kent coast. His practice began in comics and graphic fiction before shedding narrative entirely and moving into symbols, totems and performance. Newspapers found on trains between Ramsgate and Margate become the base material. The current body of work, Semiosis: Totems For Global Changem is described by Pure as liberation technology and psychic acupuncture. His last show at Salon Gallery included paint, print, paste-up and a performance with Margate’s Loser Gang.
Q: You've been at this for over two decades, from the Foundry in East London to Berlin to Margate. What brought you to the Kent coast?
A: Materialising on the Kent Coast in the UK was like waking from a dream. Cities are constructs of imagination—they have power and speak in a secret language of signs and symbols, of will and human desire.
The ocean also speaks. But it is not a human language. The sea has the feeling of infinity, it fills the entirety of vision, though it's literally a drop in the ocean. Micro and macro scale interactions. As above. So below. The rock pools. The monumental power of the high tide. The shallows where you can see it—this is where life began. The primordial pools of creation.
That is a creative energy, not to be harnessed or exploited, but to be tuned into, to ebb and flow with. That and the fish and chips.
Q: You started in comics and graphic fiction and ended up making totems and performing rituals. How did that evolution happen?
A: Comics were the first form. The initiator. The catalyst that mutates DNA. Prepare for contact.
Everyone has that cultural artefact, that film, that cartoon that came through popular, mainstream entertainment and permanently warped their fragile young mind. 2000AD in the UK had this effect. Nemesis the Warlock. A.B.C. Warriors. Slaine. Never the same.
The aim with creating comics was to be that agent of change. The messenger of the gods. Plus comics are the art that contain all arts—visual, graphic, story, typography. For a long time story was the method and the means—the channel, the beam. Now the work has moved beyond story, beyond language—shedding the gaudy, beautiful drag of pop fiction and standing pure and unobstructed by genre forms, by linear narrative.
Beyond story, beyond language. The symbol set, the totem as direct conduit to the realm of forms. The realm of pure meaning. Expressing the unlanguageable.
Q: You use newspapers found on trains between Ramsgate and Margate. What happens to them before they become work?
A: Found items carry a psychic charge. They have lived. They are discarded like trash and found like treasures. Taken into the lab, thrown into the athanor, torn apart and laid out to see what they really say—William Gibson and Brion Gysin believed the cut-up technique was the only way to see what was really being said. Here they are applied to found objects, a door from an IKEA cupboard—more forgotten, many-storied items. Pasted up. A portrait of the present. Ripped and scarred and beautiful.
Symbols are collected and created in response to the words and pictures of the paper. Meanwhile the construct is painted over, obfuscating meaning with emotion. The impassioned stroke of the brush—a call and response. A balancing. Priming the material for the master symbol set, combined and calibrated, to land. To bloom. Layers of meaning and feeling pierced with intent.
Q: You performed with Loser Gang at Salon Gallery. What does a performance look like for you?
A: An act of intentional collective effervescence. Creating a positive psychic charge that will last. That will transform a space. Anti-haunting. Creating a permanent indentation on the psychic architecture of a neighbourhood, a town, a nation, a planet.
Rendered in light and sound and movement—a physical technological entanglement. Symbols are created specifically for the site. Music/sound is generated and the symbols are stacked and manipulated to that audio input—call and response again.
A sequence is created and the artist steps into the light. The beamer projects the symbols onto the body and the bodies move to the sound and the whole place reverberates and resonates with pure intention. Banging.
Q: You call the work "liberation technology" and "psychic acupuncture." Those are big claims. What do you actually want the work to do?
A: To affect reality. To change "just how it is." Like the ichthys activating Philip K. Dick on his doorstep. The symbols are designed to initiate anamnesis—instant access to the universal truth that we are all one. That we are nature. That we are the planet and that we are god. We don't have to be afraid. But we do have to act.
The symbols are psychic technology. They act on the noosphere, the information layer surrounding our planet. They insert new information into the cloud—a "spontaneous self-monitoring negentropic vortex tending to progressively subsume and incorporate its environment into arrangements of information." Let's have it.
Post-truth, fake news—these are the birth pains of the new age. The old consensus reality dissolving. Good. Let's not rebuild it. Fuck truth. Let's make science fiction. Let's make it a world we actually want to live in.
Q: Where is the work heading from here?
A: Out and up—riding the 7 rays like a carrier wave, white light splitting through the prism of the work, collapsing into form in strange and distant worlds. One potential future in a multiverse of infinite potentialities. That and the continual exploration of new forms, new grounds—digital and physical, performative and gallery based will all continue to unfold. The change will happen on its own. Bigger. Brighter. Further.
Now, imagine symbol chambers where the individual steps in and is assessed by benevolent robot eyes and ears. A unique symbol set generated to harmonise their precise mental-physical-emotional state. Totems tailored to their needs. They are beamed up, bathed in the symbol structure. DNA is permanently altered. Before carrying on with their weekly shop at the big Tesco's.
