Melbourne artist, Ashley Ronning, creates intricate illustrated worlds in her zines and prints. Below, she shares some of her inspirations and goals.
I tend to include a lot of nature imagery in my work, and this winter I have been delving into colder and darker depths of microscopic worlds, like ecosystems inside of old logs and the amazing lives of insects we never even think about. But on the other side of my work, I’m absolutely fascinated by space and earth’s communication attempts with other life forms. I’m hardly ever drawing about the human world lately.
I’ve started to explore the idea of presenting a body of work as a zine or handmade book rather than in an exhibition. It’s so wonderful to make art affordable for my friends and give out something to hold and keep. It can give my work a larger audience, but at the same time makes it a tactile and private thing for each owner of a zine. I really want to push my print experiments. I’ve been doing almost all my printing lately with a risograph printer, which gives a really beautiful result for such a low cost. I want to work on layering more and more colours on my prints, as well as bringing up the production quality a little more each time I produce new work. I want to purchase a thermal binder next, and work on a pretty scarily big book idea I have in mind. New contacts and seeing new work opens up more and more possibilities about where you can take self-publishing.
