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| 1 | ## Nothing is Wasted |
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| 3 | There is no wasted time, only lessons. That is the premise that I start from. I have a curatorial relationship with my materials, and with the story that unfolds as I keep them close to me. My materials tend to have a life of their own as a work-in-progress before they are gathered together to create a composition. I use salvaged materials in my work. Things that people throw away I bring back inside and elaborate, I use tin cans, scraps of fabric, old jewelry, thin plastic bags, letters, cardboard, books, vintage dolls, and memories from estate sales. This trans-medium recycling and collage create sculptures, wearables, and performance art that have both a visual story and a history. Each one feeding the next. Each one is in its own phase of life, revising its message as it lives. A common theme in my work is fungi and mold, they are the recyclers of the earth. They take what we throw away and make something new, our dying trees and toxic spills slowly become fruiting bodies and fertilizer over time, creating something rich and new. |
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| 5 | We are born from the universe remembering something from before we were here. That energy gets lost in the unlearning that prepares us for this world, the waking dream of our life. We yearn to communicate those feelings before we know the words for "I am here, I am alive, I see you, I love you", the garbled chaos that forms our first memories full of confusion, joy, fear, and wonder creates the foundation for our experience as humans. |
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| 7 | Those ineffable truths are the small fires in the dark that we all huddle around, knowing that they are there but not knowing how to point to them. My work points to those parts of me that are there but unable to speak. They look like primordial screams in pictures, love letters to those no longer with us, artifacts of a time not yet passed, experiential joy in choosing to take up space, desires to dig further down the rabbit hole, to show the beauty of everything that's never been looked at with the love it deserves, to stretch our minds just far enough that we are still able to see where we came from but understand that we can never go back. I hold a small light up to each piece and say "This is important too. Nothing is wasted". |
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| 9 | ## Biography |
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| 11 | Ashes Monroe grew up in California's Central Valley, a landscape shaped by agricultural labor, impossible beauty, ever-widening class divides and the mythologies of the wild west. That early tension between endurance and reinvention would later echo through her work. She studied Psychology and Art, then found her footing in San Francisco's underground art scene, building immersive worlds in painting and photography before relocating to Paris to begin again from scratch. |
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| 13 | Over two decades, her photographic and installation work has unfolded across Europe, the United States, and South America. She is known for world-building; environments that feel part ritual, part dream logic, part psychological landscape. Her practice blends assemblage, environmental installation, narrative design, and performance, often orbiting transformation, mortality, and the hidden systems that shape human experience. |
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| 15 | Alongside her artistic work, Ashes has supported individuals navigating crisis and altered states through her work in Psychedelic integration coaching, offering grounded presence for people moving through intense psychedelic experiences. This interest in big emotions, liminal consciousness, and the edges of identity informs her creative language. She approaches these experiences as laboratories of meaning, places where fear, awe, and revelation reorganize the self. |
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| 17 | Now living in Greensboro Bend, Vermont, on land she is slowly transforming into an ecological art environment with a developing mushroom farm, she creates forest-based installations rooted in natural materials and cycles of decay and renewal. Removed from the density of San Francisco's performance community, and the performers she once collaborated with, she has turned toward puppetry as both adaptation and evolution. In the absence of a built-in troupe, she builds her own characters, constructing intimate theatrical worlds that explore death, reinvention, and emotional metamorphosis. |
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| 19 | Her work continues as a living archive of symbolic inquiry: a cathartic library of open-ended stories shaped by ecology, altered consciousness, and the ongoing act of becoming. |