Ashlin McAndrew (b. 1994, Morristown, NJ) lives and works between New Mexico, New York, and Ireland. She develops installation-based works from discarded and decommissioned materials—mass-produced commodities, foraged stones and clays, components from infrastructural systems—transforming them through hand-stitching and assemblage. Her process unfolds through sustained contact: handling and living with objects until shared narratives emerge between maker and material.
McAndrew sews invisible stories, often coded as "women's labor," into works that expose how value and use are assigned to matter in a normative way. By making these hidden narratives visible, she reveals the performativity of consumerism—the ways its logics inscribe themselves into both organic and synthetic bodies. Her practice operates as a form of collective archaeology, excavating the imprint of place and time embedded in discarded things.
Recent work extends beyond the studio into public spaces where installations meet weather and organic rhythms. McAndrew facilitates participatory projects that reframe spectators as collaborators, holding space for grief and slowness as forms of resistance to disposability. Central to her practice is cultivating attention within systems that flatten experience, encouraging embodied knowledge through repair.