SPREAD | ArtCulture

By Kiša Lala

Ashley Bickerton photographed at his studio in Bali by Bobby Fisher, 2011

Ashley Bickerton has darkened his timbre after carousing the neon-lit nights of Pan-Asian hotspots. He says that he’s entered a new phase – his kids have grown, he’s newly separated, and as such, work follows life. He tells me that a while back it was filled with “Pregnant wives and giggling babies. My work was full of sun-dappled, sparkling, turquoise blue waters, beauty and optimism. And somehow, now we are in this dark neon wilderness.”

Bickerton, who has been in Bali 17 years, has for sometime been documenting that life in the nexus of tranquil beaches and rapacious megacities that spike the world’s coastlines. His art is a collision of cultures, peopled with the migrant archetypes that spawn the sun-bleached shores typical of Bahia, Goa, Ibiza, and in his backyard, their Thai and Balinese replicants. Gluttonous tribes of tourists, screaming banshees with neon skins snake across canvases splashed with iridescent colours in toxic contrast to nature’s paradisiac beaches.
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