In a hotel lobby built for luxury and artful headshots, Ashley Stuart’s sculpture looked like it just oozed up through the marble floor. A slick black ring rose from two gloopy base forms, with a quartet of candle holders flanking the space nearby. Her installation, part of BREDA’s Time Bar at The Joule during Dallas Art Fair Week, slithered into your peripheral vision, unapologetically strange, like Gaetano Pesce if he forgot his color palette. Under the lobby's carefully calibrated lighting, her glossy forms captured and distorted reflections, creating their own internal clock of shifting shadows.
Stuart’s work doesn’t sit comfortably in categories. Part of its charm is that it’s functional, but also deeply sculptural. Her practice began with jewelry, mutated into home objects, and now exists somewhere between maximalist design and emotional residue. “Everything was kind of a journey from jewelry, trying to find ways to solidify clay,” she says. “It just grew from there. I think the goopy, glassy, glossy look is so beautiful and fun to work with. The possibilities are endless.”
Those possibilities don’t come easy. Resin is fickle, temperamental, and sticky in more ways than one. But Stuart, who’s entirely self-taught, makes it work on instinct, not instruction. “I’m so used to working with it now that I never really have problems,” she says, before adding, “As long as I keep making things, I have those satisfying ‘aha’ moments, and that’s everything.”
That phrase, keep making things, goes beyond a creative mantra for Stuart. It’s a logistical challenge, an emotional commitment, and a refusal to disappear. As a mother, artist, and full-time person (which, let’s be honest, is its own kind of job), time isn’t something she has in abundance. It’s something she has to fight for. “Being a mom makes time a privilege,” she says. “The number of times I’ve canceled on friends because of work or kids is wild. But this is mine and their future. That’s something I won’t sacrifice.”
In a culture that treats time as either a hustle or a luxury, Stuart frames it as something closer to survival. The hours she carves out for herself, for her work, for joy, aren’t accidental, they’re hard-won. Her objects didn’t emerge from unlimited time and perfect conditions. They came from the in-between: after school drop-offs, before the next deadline, during those rare, golden hours when no one is asking for anything. “I want to take advantage of every second,” she says. “I have to be strategic about it to make space to create.” There’s something about art made under pressure. Not the pressure of a deadline; no, but the pressure of every cell in your body screaming to make something. That bubbling urgency demands release, but it’s not always that easy.
Her work, like her schedule, is built around the margins. It’s why her pieces vibrate with a sort of joyous urgency. “I’ve worked on pieces during rough times in my life,” she says. “It’s been an escape for me. I’m not sure if that translates in the work, but I think that’s why it all means so much.”
And people feel that. They buy her pieces not just because they’re cool (they are), but because they make spaces feel personal. “My house looking cute matters to me,” Stuart says. “I’ve never had a lot of money to buy nice things, so I wanted to make them, for myself and for other people.” That desire, to make beauty that’s accessible and alive, runs through everything she does. “Seeing people excited to make their space cool with my work is a happiness I can’t explain.”
At The Joule, Stuart’s pieces felt both out of place and exactly right, like they knew a little secret. “I just want my art to make people happy,” she says. “And hopefully leave them wanting more, so they come to my next show.”
That authenticity, unvarnished yet profound, is what gives her work its gravitational pull. Stuart is embodying artistry not cosplaying it. Her sculptures may twist and gleam and refuse easy categorization, but beneath their liquid-like surfaces runs something unshakable: a conviction that carving out time–for beauty even if it unsettles, for objects that speak without words, for creations that exist because something inside someone couldn't bear for them not to–isn't just a luxury. It's oxygen. It's pulse. It's how we remember we're alive.
Images by Helen Jade.
