Ash Kukuzke is an Iowa-raised, Portland-based Graphic Designer and Artist. Her work explores her experience with Aphantasia—the absence of mental imagery—alongside themes of retrospection, grief, and nostalgia for her rural upbringing. Through digital and analog mediums, she prompts viewers to engage with forms of visual obfuscation and their impact on memory.
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Entropy, 2024
My grandma taught me how to crochet. Instead of making anything constructive, I would spend hours stitching a single chain until I used up an entire ball of yarn. When I was done I would pull the chain apart, undoing the knots and winding the gnarled string back into a ball for next time.
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Mystic, Iowa, 2021/2023
One mile north of Mystic, Iowa (population 327) my parents purchased an abandoned farmhouse for twenty-thousand dollars across the road from my maternal grandfather’s place. The house sat unoccupied for over a decade after the previous owner died in the downstairs bathroom and the townspeople decided it was haunted. Before my father could demolish the house and rebuild it, my grandfather died on May 22nd, 2022. He was buried in a town called Lemons. My parents sold the house to a chicken farmer.
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Epitaph, 2024
Object Permanence, 2023
Earliest Memory, 2024
My grandma was raised in a town called Lemons. Born into a poor family of chicken farmers, she married at 15 and gave birth to seven daughters. A week after her 75th birthday, my grandma died on November 5th, 2020. There wasn’t a funeral. Nine months after her death, I flew back to Iowa and visited her home but I couldn’t step inside.