Ashleigh Cooper

VIRTUAL TOUR

ARTIST CATALOGUE

To Become a Woman

Growing up, intimacy and comfort were rarely offered to me. I pushed them away whenever I felt vulnerable and sought them instead in fleeting sexual encounters with men. These experiences, simultaneously intimate and damaging, became the foundation for my practice, which investigates the entanglement of shame, desire, and the body. ‘To Become a Woman’ is an attempt to grasp the reality of sexual shame and the process of becoming through it. 

The work explores the home as a site where intimacy first forms and where one’s sense of self is constructed. At birth, the baby latches onto the breast of its mother until it becomes conscious and aware of its own individuality. It is in this moment of awareness, when the self recognises its sexuality, that shame begins to take root. To become a woman is to become sexualised, and thus to become ashamed of that sexuality. My work interrogates this moment: the emergence of sexual shame, the self-directed harm it produces, and the tension between intimacy and estrangement. 

My practice draws from theorists such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sara Ahmed, and Julia Kristeva, whose writings on shame, affect, and abjection underpin my thinking. Sedgwick’s notion of shame as both exposure and concealment resonates throughout my work; shame drives the desire to hide, yet in hiding, it exposes itself. Ahmed’s concept of affect as “sticky” shapes how I approach materials like hair, blood, and breath; substances that cling, stain, and circulate between bodies. Kristeva’s writing on abjection informs my understanding of disgust and the porous boundaries between self and other, clean and unclean, sacred and profane. Across these ideas, the figure of the witch appears as a symbolic thread. 

Historically, witches were ordinary women, healers, midwives, or those living beyond patriarchal expectation, whose bodily knowledge and agency were demonised. Their persecution marked an early attempt to regulate female sexuality and autonomy, transforming women’s bodies into sites of moral panic. By invoking the witch, I connect my own work to this lineage of women whose intimacy with their bodies and knowledge was reframed as dangerous. Each work transforms shame from an invisible emotion into a material form. In my practice, shame is not hidden; it is embodied, performed, and made tangible. The body becomes both subject and medium, leaking, consuming, and exposing itself. Hair becomes a wearable skin, blood becomes paint, breath becomes fog. These gestures are not about purification or confession but about holding space for contradiction: the beauty and horror of exposure, the intimacy of disgust, and the tenderness of self-harm. 

Ultimately, my work investigates the thresholds between self-love and unlove, agency and vulnerability, intimacy and shame. By materialising and performing these experiences, I aim to reclaim agency over narratives of femininity and desire, turning what was once a wound into a method of seeing and feeling. To Become a Woman becomes not just an act of representation, but a reclamation; a space where shame is not hidden, but allowed to exist, to breathe, and to transform.