About the Artist Educator
(Wielding a camera at age 4.)
Ashley Norman is an artist, educator, and community builder, who holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art and a BFA in Art Education from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA.
An experienced artist educator, Norman has taught for over a decade in New Hampshire, Maine, North Carolina, and Massachusetts in a variety of programs spanning higher education, public schools, and alternative, community, and adult education. Currently she teaches and coordinates courses in Art Education at Plymouth State University, and supervises the art education student teachers in their K-12 or community based placements.
As an artist she works under the pseudonym Ashley Normal. Making observations in the everyday, she illuminates the bizarre and absurd in the familiar. Through drawing, painting, mixed-media, altered materials, and performance she creates works where nothing is as it seems, and which communicate issues around: womanhood, gender, mental illness, family, and social taboos. She connects with the Japanese ceramic method and philosophy Kintsugi, which treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object. Rather than something to disguise, the imperfections of an object adds to its allure, making it more beautiful for having been broken. She is drawn to the relationship of attraction and repulsion, dark humor, and the surreal.
Her work has recently been exhibited at the 2018 CMCA Biennial, Rockland, ME; 3S Artspace Gallery, Portsmouth, NH; Lamont Gallery, Exeter, NH; Nave Gallery, Somerville, MA; Bardo Gallery, Cambridge, MA; and the MAKE8ELIEVE Magazine, Chicago, IL & Geneva, Switzerland. She was a finalist for the Walter Feldman Fellowship in 2015, as well as awarded Best in Show at the Rochester Biennial, Rochester Museum of Fine Arts, Rochester, NH, 2015. Her work is represented by Chases Garage Gallery, York, ME and Nahcotta Gallery, Portsmouth, NH.
She currently resides in Nashua, NH with her partner and son.
