Ashleigh Beattie is a Zimbabwean born visual artist based in Manchester. As an artist living in the African diaspora, her practice explores themes of migration, displacement and belonging through drawing, print, sculpture and installation.  Beattie’s installations often make use of everyday and sometimes overlooked materials such as, newspapers and tin cans that are embedded with personal meaning and memories. This repurposing is central to her work and draws from her childhood growing up in Zimbabwe.

 

More recently Beattie has been exploring the geopolitics that surround issues of modern-day extraction and exhaustion of the land. Through the use of wild clay excavated by the artist herself, Beattie considers her position and relationship to the land of her past with the land she now inhabits and asks others to consider theirs also.