Sunday 30 November 2025, 7.30pm
ALL POWER EMANATES FROM THE LAND is a new live audiovisual performance expanding on the soundscape made for Jessica Ashman’s exhibition ‘Those That Do Not Smile Will Kill Me’, at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery - the result of Ashman’s research within the biology and botany collections of the museum. Through doom metal, punk, folk song, field recordings, sound design and animation, the trio of Jessica, Auclair and Richard Phoenix perform a visceral energetic song cycle dedicated to the different plants central to the lives of enslaved African Jamaicans and offers an imagining otherwise to the trauma and violence of the botanical colonialism within the archives.
Opening the night, Shenece Oretha offers a call and response between seed and drum. Her sculptural sound celebrates the resistant technologies of Caribbean music and instruments. Seeds will rattle out a beat in the space and set the stage for response and chant.
- Jessica Ashman / voice, electric guitar, percussion, samples, animation
- Auclair / voice, drumkit and percussion
- Richard Phoenix / drumkit and electric bass
Jessica Ashman is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, animation, moving image, music, performance and installation. Ashman’s soundscapes and music are cinematic and heavily narrative based, relying on a mix of self-taught guitar (from her time as part of DIY Space for London’s, First Timers, that saw Ashman create her former band, Secret Power) and Ashman’s own vocals. Ashman seeks to create transformative spaces that compliment the animated and installation based worlds she makes, leaning in to discordant riffs, dark reverbed ambience, layered harmonies and poetry.
Auclair is a British-Rwandan music and sound artist, inspired by Black radical feminist theory, science fiction literature, and horror films. Her work explores rhythm and voice and takes an embodied approach to exploring ideas with sound. Alongside recordings, her practice takes form in live performances, installations, film scores and multidisciplinary collaborations. Her latest release, Giramata, is out now on Amorphous Sounds.
Richard Phoenix is an artist integrating painting, writing, music and facilitation. Making work that explores the rhythm, harmony and dissonance to be found in co-operation, support and art-making and the resulting balance between care and domination to be navigated. Recently presented the exhibition ‘Before You Die You’ve Got to Dance’ and accompanying LP ‘Lilac’ at Project 78 Gallery.
Shenece Oretha is a multidisciplinary artist currently listening from London. Her practice is invested in the mobilising potential of sound enacted through sculpture, installation, poetry, print and collective action.
