AYU WHITMORE
Hi, I'm Ayu.
2006 zoomer from York. Second year BA Illustration student at Nottingham Trent University.
AYU.WHITMORE[at]GMAIL[dot]COM
My practice mixes illustration with theory, mainly surrounding digital culture. Spanning from image-making to audio-visuals, I aim to bring coherence to ideas often locked behind institutions or cultural gatekeeping.
Being raised on the web, I don’t see it as a dystopian sinkhole or a “dead internet.” Like early 20th-century art rebels, I view digital subcultures as something organic, formed through a shared rejection of the status quo and a desire to imagine new worlds rejecting the exclusive, hyper-financialised art mainstream.
I love contradiction: high and low culture, sincerity and irony. My visual language draws from eclectic internet ephemera, alt-lit, anti-aesthetics, and even videogames (which are art!).
B)
Fundamental to my work is a concern with access - who gets to understand the systems shaping their lives, and who doesn’t. I aim to disrupt that imbalance by exposing absurdities, not by providing answers, but by creating art where ideas are encountered differently - where what feels natural, inevitable, or given can be questioned
.
“Bad taste” is good taste. It’s a refusal of imposed aesthetic hierarchies, a way of asking who decides what is proper, what is vulgar, what is acceptable. Aesthetics and power are intertwined, and visual culture can both normalise and resist systems of control. Creativity, to me, is resistance, especially in an economy that demands constant output whilst privatising stress.
If there’s one thing I want you to take from my work, it’s this: question what conditions made that meme you saw recently so funny in the first place. Make the familiar feel strange again :]
