Ashley Eriksmoen

Ashley Eriksmoen is a California-born Australia-based furniture maker, woodworker, artist, and educator.
Early life and education.
Eriksmoen was born in raised in southern California. Eriksmoen attended Boston College, receiving a BS in Geology in 1992. She took a year off during undergraduate to study art at the Istituto Lorenzo de' Medici in Florence, Italy. Eriksmoen studied at the College of the Redwoods (now the Krenov School) from 1997 to 1998, receiving a Certificate of Fine Woodworking. She went on to receive a Masters in Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 2000.
Career.
Artist.
Eriksmoen uses salvaged urban waste such as tables and chairs to create complex interwoven sculptures. She was included in a curated group exhibition in 2019 about humans and the environment titled "I Thought I Heard a Bird" at Craft ACT in Canberra, Australia. Her series "Feral: Rewilding Furniture," made with found broken timber, personifies and animates found furniture, comparing the living and built world. Eriksmoen was an artist-in-residence artist at San Diego State University Eriksmoen is a member of the Furniture Society and a part of the Studio Furniture movement.
Her artwork has been published in "500 Tables", "American Woodworker Magazine", and "With Wakened Hands", a book on the students of James Krenov. She was awarded a Fuji Xerox Sustainable Art Award in 2014 Eriksmoen's piece "Criogriff" was featured in the exhibition "Making a Seat at the Table: Women Transform Woodworking" at the Center for Art in Wood in 2019. She was also interviewed for a book on the same topic by the show's curators Laura Mays and Deirdre Visser which is set to be released in 2020.
Educator.
Eriksmoen is the head of the Furniture Design program at the Australian National University's School of Art and Design.