Sean Ashton
- Senior Lecturer
- Sculpture MA
Sean Ashton is a writer of fiction, art criticism and poetry.
Sean Ashton teaches on the MA Sculpture programme, focusing on the integration of theory and practice. His PhD (Goldsmiths College, 2004) explored the changing status of the readymade since its Duchampian inception. Since then, he has published widely as a novelist, art critic and poet. His novels include Living in a Land (Ma Bibliothèque, 2017) and The Way to Work (Salt, 2023). A former associate editor of Map Magazine (2007-12) and reviews writer for Art Review (2012–17), in 2018 he was runner-up in the IAAC International Awards for art criticism.
Key details
School, Centre or Area
Expertise
More information
Research interests
Sean Ashton is interested in constraints. The novel Living in a Land (Ma Bibliothèque, 2017) is the memoir of a man who can only construct sentences in the negative, and can therefore only tell us what he has never done. The novel The Way to Work (Salt, 2023) relates the tale of a man who boards his morning train only to find himself in a locomotive equivalent of Purgatory: a vehicle of apparently infinite length on which he is now to reside for eternity. Sampler (Valley Press, 2020) is a poetry collection presented as a selection of ‘entries’ from an imaginary encyclopaedia written entirely by poets. Ashton’s first book, Sunsets (Alma Books, 2007), is a collection of reviews of imaginary artworks and other cultural phenomena.
Ashton’s interest in constraints is somewhat disingenuous, since all art is about constraint. But his writing is certainly more constrained than most, extending from the imposition of epistemological structures (as with Sampler) to rigid grammar and rhetoric that restricts what is sayable (as with Living in a Land). These concerns affect all his writing, even this statement, which, though written by Ashton, has been made to sound like it’s been written by someone else.
Practice
Sean Ashton is an Associate Editor of the print and online journal Inscription: The Journal of Material Text – Theory, Practice, History. Ashton was the inaugural writer in residence for this publication, contributing a vinyl LP (and online) recording of his novel Living in a Land to the first issue in 2020.
Awards
IAAC International Awards for Art Criticism (runner-up), 2017-18
Current and recent projects
Jungle Kisses (novel, 2024- )
Ashton’s current novel Jungle Kisses concerns the fortunes of a literary scholar who invokes the spirit of Charlotte Brontë. Charlotte becomes his intellectual Governess in his new role teaching creative writing at an independent university in Norfolk run by a Vice-Chancellor with Down’s Syndrome and a charismatic non-binary professor named Mallard Drake. This institution is less a university than a vehicle for social change, a Black Mountain College for the 21st century. The novel will appear in 2025 or 2026.
Publications, exhibitions, other outcomes
Ashton, S. (2023) The Way to Work. Sheffield: Salt Publications.
Ashton, S. (2020) Sampler. Scarborough: Valley Press.
Ashton, S. (2020). Living in a Land. Vinyl LP and download, excerpts from novel Living in a Land (distributed with Issue 1 of the journal Inscription, eds. Adam Smyth, Gill Partington, Simon Morris; York: Information as Material).
Ashton, S. (2017) Living in a Land. London: Ma Bibliothèque.
Ashton, S. (2007). Sunsets. London: Alma Books