Ash Tower (he/him) is an artist and researcher working on Whadjuk country, Western Australia. He is a Samstag Scholar, a Churchie Emerging Art Prize Finalist, and a former ACE Studio Resident. He has exhibited internationally, notably in Italy and Japan, and currently teaches at Curtin University. In 2018 he was part of a team which convened SPECTRA 2018 after its hiatus, and his research focuses on interdisciplinarity and fringe knowledge production, including art/science collaboration.

Ash Tower, fell star (installation view). 2024, dimensions variable. Photo: Sam Roberts

Tell us about your experience with ANAT SPECTRA.
SPECTRA 2018 was happening at an exciting time. I got to work with a great team from ANAT and UniSA. MOD. Museum had just opened on North Terrace, and I had just submitted my PhD on art/science collaborations in Australian laboratories (so my memories are fond but a little jumbled). I hope it was a good opportunity for the community to reconvene and see what everyone had been up to, and it’s wonderful that it has continued this way.

Conferences like SPECTRA are a great way for new practitioners to enter the community of art/science/tech work in Australia, and to understand its long history. There’s so much that’s been written about these ideas, and it takes years to get through—it’s much easier to just speak to people who’ve done it. For me, SPECTRA 2018 was an opportunity to meet everyone whose work I had been reading about for a long time, and I know it was a formative time for me. I hope the delegates remember it fondly.

What or who inspires you in the realm of interdisciplinary practice, and why?
I’m not sure I have a good answer here, but it seems there are some things which consistently appear in good collaborations or interdisciplinary spaces—I think it has to start from curiosity. When you’re curious about something you just start looking into it, trying it out, and meeting people who can help you. It’s an unsettling process of mistakes, miscalculations, embarrassing admissions, and surprises. And all of it happens without ‘disciplines’: you’re not thinking about these broad intellectual boxes—that sort of disciplinary location work comes later.

It’s also useful to feel on the edge of a bunch of different communities; it can be a precarious position. Sometimes you’ve got to become a discipline traitor, or a fugitive actor in your own field. You’re often making and doing things that don’t look like art. This is a big creative risk, because it makes you hard to read or predict (and subsequently, hard to trust with opportunities), but I think the best thing you can do is just chase down the interesting thing and worry about the rest later.

Ash Tower, starsick. 2025, balsa wood. 28 x 21 x 2 cm. Photo: courtesy of the artist.

Name a cultural work (film, book, music etc) that inspired or challenged your creative perspective, and tell us why.
I recently returned to Australia from Rome, following a year at the British School at Rome supported by a Samstag Scholarship. It was a very pivotal time for me, and I experienced lots of shifts in my making.

While I was there, I read the work of Piero Camporesi, a historian of Italian literature. Camporesi wrote a lot of history about early-modern Italy. His work describes that period as a time of wandering delirium arising from widespread famine in the peasant classes, and the thinning of the boundaries between sleep, death, dreams, and hallucinations. In Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe (1983), he investigates how famine resulted in peasants altering the recipes of their bread to incorporate foraged and sometimes narcotic elements and ‘stretch’ their wheat supply, resulting in both malnutrition and hallucinogenic exhaustion. I was particularly struck by his unwillingness to differentiate between dreams, hallucinations, and divine revelations within his work. Throughout his writing Camporesi refers to ‘upside-down’ or inverted worlds (a common medieval descriptor of the ‘end times’), and places emphasis on visions in the sky. Camporesi’s writing also tries to capture the confusing synthesis of tradition, folk belief, and church influence which is responsible for so much strife in the period.

I also read The Cheese and the Worms (1979) by Carlo Ginzberg which tells the story of a miller by the name of Menocchio, who was tried and executed in the sixteenth century for his espousal of novel (or heretical) Christian theology (which he had likely hybridised with pre-Christian peasant beliefs). Through this work I became very interested in the histories of folk beliefs and the role of the hermit—themes I think will return in my work at some point.

I think these authors stuck with me because they’re describing historical periods which see the expansion and consolidation of today’s institutions. In telling stories about these ‘errant’ characters, they also describe the negative shape or the inverted form of institutional or orthodox knowing. I’m very interested in how these stories can show the edges of institutional power and can offer insights into the great enlightenment project before it congealed into an ordered system.

Ash Tower, Ask of Me Tomorrow. 2021, Tasmanian oak, neon, vinyl. Photo: Sam Roberts

If you could collaborate with any figure from history or contemporary culture, who would it be and why?
There are lots of little threads I’d like to chase down. While I was in Rome, I had the opportunity to see some reliquaries (containers for Christian relics) from the Vatican Museums’ collections. I was accompanied by Dr. James Miller, a colleague and specialist of the lives and relics of saints. We were assisted by two members of the conservation team who were maintaining and restoring the objects laid out before us, and we had a great chat about the production and historic context of the reliquaries laid out on the table before us. On returning to Australia, I started researching and trying out some of the techniques that were employed in making those reliquaries. It would make for an exciting collaboration—I have no idea what kind of work that would produce, but I suppose that’s the point.

Another unrealised project which I didn’t get to pursue while I was in Rome was with the priests at the Vatican Observatory in Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome. The history of the Vatican observatory stretches back to 1787, and the observatory has always catered to clergy who direct their studies into astronomy and physics. There’s a long history of clergy-scientists within Catholicism, and I’m very interested to understand the types of knowledge that are produced in the observatory. I’m also fascinated by the historical relationships between the sciences and faith, and much of my work over the last few years has attempted to chart this terrain on the edges of knowing, believing, and speculating. I hope I’ll get to pursue that connection one day.

Now that I’m back and working in Boorloo/Perth, I’ve dusted off some older research on meteorites—I’d love to get to work with some folks over here about that, but I’m still in the early stages of figuring out who to speak with. Who knows, it might be a new trajectory?

What’s next? Tell us about your next project, collaboration or thinking.
I’m working away in the studio—still thinking a lot about meteorites, stars, and atmospheric phenomena. I’ve been learning some new skills in jewellery, carpentry, and some 3D modelling software. I returned from Rome with a lot of energy and curiosity, so I’m hoping to channel that into a new project soon.