Louise Ashcroft
Louise Ashcroft
‘Unicorns of Westfield’ (2017) HD Video 5 minutes 36 seconds.
Unicorns of Westfield is a film made on an action camera which Louise created during a six month 'residency' in the Westfield shopping centre of Stratford's Olympic Park as part of her Arebyte Gallery show I'd Rather Be Shopping. Attracted to the ordinariness and inclusivity of the mall, but conflicted about consumerism, climate change and wealth inequality, Louise wanders (uninvited and incognito) around the shops; analysing products, text and imagery she finds, through a poetic voiceover which attempts to make mythical connections and prophetic suggestions about mankind's neo-primitive consumer death-drive which infects the mall in the form of cartoon unicorns, anxious T-shirt slogans and bizarre parodies of 'natural' habitats. Reading into things too much, she evokes a comically dystopian psychoanalysis of consumerism, while revelling in the destructive pleasures of its excessive promises. Post-pandemic, nostalgia for the immersion of the traditional shopping experience gives this work a new kind of eeriness.