Ashley Holmes works with sound, performance, publishing and broadcasting. His work critically examines the ways Black music and sound function as sites of knowledge production, collective memory, as ritual, as spiritual and as sites of liberation.

Holmes’ recent work addresses notions of belonging, identity, grief and the ways listening practices have enabled us to build narratives and ask questions around the ways Western norms of ownership and property shape the circulation of music, access to land and relationships to place. In his ongoing series of live audio essays Dub Epistemology he situates these questions within a wider discourse around identity, coloniality and historical, cultural and social contexts.

Project: I-Waaata

I-Waaata is a body of work by Ashley Holmes that combines sound, printmaking and writing. Created for the degree show exhibition, it draws on practices within Black musical traditions to explore memory as something living and continually changing. The work considers belonging, identity, grief, and the ways listening helps shape narratives and understand histories, contexts and geographies.

The title playfully reimagines the Jamaican patois phrase eye-water, meaning tears, referencing the linguistic histories of the Caribbean and West Africa. I-Waaata has developed from an interest in the stories, knowledges and symbolic presence of water and land within Black music and sound practices.

Through audio, Holmes uses versioning and bootlegging to reanimate stories, archives and familiar histories. Across writing, drawing and printmaking, repetition and language explore how grief exists alongside imagination and possibility, creating relationships between past and present, land and sound, and individual experience and collective memory.