Photo: Cooper Brady
Dr Karike Ashworth is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist-researcher-teacher living and working in Meeanjin (Brisbane). Her experimental research practice spans performance, time-based media, objects, and installation. Informed by a feminist epistemological approach, she works from a woman’s perspective—always—using her practice to examine how gendered expectations and patriarchal structures shape, discipline, and sustain women’s labour, bodies, and roles over time. She has exhibited widely, received national awards, and her work is held in numerous public collections. Karike is Vice President of Australian Museums and Galleries Association Queensland (AMaGAQ), a sessional academic at QUT (Creative Industries), and holds a PhD in Visual Arts and a Master of Secondary Teaching from QUT.
and the extraordinary
Hooping Loop (2019)
Photo: Andrea Higgins
Practice
Dr Karike Ashworth’s practice is grounded in a studio-based model that privileges long-term engagement, repetition, and accumulation. Her work often unfolds through extended cycles of making, pausing, and returning, allowing questions of labour, care, and value to be sustained rather than concluded. Across her career, this has taken the form of both performative works employing hyper-spectacle and objects made from banal, domestic, or discarded materials.
Her performative persona Brave Girl exemplifies her earlier use of spectacle to surface contradiction and exposure, using the body as a site through which cultural expectations become visible. More recently, Ashworth has begun to question the sustainability of spectacle itself, turning her attention toward other forms of persistence, maintenance, and embodied discipline. This shift reflects a growing interest in how care labour and mastery are held in the body without necessarily being made visible, celebrated, or redeemed.
Photo: Caroline Austin
Across both performance and object-based work, time operates not as virtue or endurance, but as condition. Ashworth’s interest in temporality is phenomenological: concerned with how duration, repetition, and obligation shape feminine experience, and how labour continues—often invisibly—until it is interrupted, withdrawn, or no longer sustained.
Highlights
Dr Karike Ashworth graduated from the Queensland College of Art in 2013 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, receiving the Godfrey River Medal for outstanding studio performance and selection as a finalist in the Graduate Art Show (GAS) at Griffith University Art Gallery. The following year she completed Honours in Visual Arts at QUT with First Class Honours and was a finalist in Excerpts: Visual Arts Showcase at The Block. Awarded a full scholarship to undertake her PhD in Visual Arts at QUT (2016–2019), this period saw the emergence of her Brave Girl persona. Her work has since received multiple awards, including the Queensland Regional Arts Textile Art Award and First Prize in the Moreton Bay Region Art Prize (2022), Highly Commended in the Sunshine Coast National Art Prize (2021), and the AAANZ Research in Focus Award for her PhD research (2020). Solo exhibitions include Lamentation, touring Queensland and NSW (with Arts Queensland support) (2014–2018), Home of the Brave I (2016), Home of the Brave II (2017), #SoBrave: an exhibition of Brave Girls (2018), Dr Brave Girl and the extraordinary Hooping Loop (2019), Always soft, Always strong (2021, 2024), and Brave Girl: The Warrior (The Condensery, Somerset, 2022). Before pursuing a career in the visual arts, Dr Ashworth worked in the financial services industry for ten years with PricewaterhouseCoopers and Deutsche Bank in Brisbane and London.