Ashmolean NOW Daphne Wright Catalogue

This exclusive catalogue accompanies the Ashmolean Museum's fourth exhibition of the Ashmolean Now series, held at the museum between 13 June to 8 February 2026. Focusing on the sculptures and mixed media artwork of award-winning Irish artist Daphne Wright (b.1963)

This intriguing publication features several new works in plaster and unfired clay which consider the tradition of still life and respond to the sculptures in the newly re-opened Ashmolean Cast Gallery Collection. Created in partnership with the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin. Included is the major new work Sons and Couch, in which Wright returns to the subject of her children. Her sons have featured in their mother's work since an early age. This ambitious life cast is presented alongside Fridge Still Life (2021) and other recent works in dialogue with objects and paintings from the museum collections.

Wright looks at the museum and the personal with the same philosophical enquiry. Her work maps the relationship between the span of life and the span of culture and between the history of lives and the history of cultures. The sculptures meditate on passing time, the transience of life and, in the sculpture of her two sons, the forging of male identity. Included are essays from Xa Sturgis, Barbara Dawson, and Emily LaBarge.

Daphne Wright (b. 1963, Co. Longford) makes sculptural installations using a variety of techniques and media, including fragile materials such as plaster, tinfoil, unfired clay, sound and video. She is curious about how a range of languages and materials can be used to probe often unspoken human preoccupations, and her visual vocabulary is inspired by suburban life, literature, theatre and art history. The warmth and subtle fragility of the objects she makes bear witness to the importance of ritual and care in daily life and the borderlines between life and death. Wright is an Elected Member of Aosdána, an Associate Academician of the Royal Hibernian Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Sculptors.

Xa Sturgis has been Director of the Ashmolean Museum since 2014. Before taking up his current post he was Director of the Holburne Museum, Bath (2005-2014) where he oversaw the Museum’s major renovation and extension. From 1990 to 2005 he worked at the National Gallery in a number of roles including Exhibitions and Programmes Curator. Emily LaBarge is a freelance writer living in London. she has contributed essays for artist books, exhibitions and monographs, including on the work of Nancy Holt, Etel Adnan, Carolee Schneemann, Margaret Raspé, Prunella Clough, Camille Henrot, Meriem Bennani, Megan Rooney, Tai Shani, and others.