Aylsa McHugh

Aylsa McHugh lives and works in Naarm. In 2002 she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.

Aylsa has exhibited in Naarm (Melbourne), Djubuguli/Cadi (Sydney), Boorloo (Perth), London and Japan and her work is held in private collections locally and internationally.
Her practice incorporates a variety of media and draws from a wide range of influences including architecture, modernism, feminism, film and urbanisation. Most recently she has been utilising collage, appropriating images found in magazines and books to create unsettling and elegant juxtapositions. McHugh is interested in how the recontextualizing and combining of found imagery can lend itself to ambiguous interpretations. The resultant assemblages, which enact simultaneously unsettling and elegant juxtapositions, inhabit an uncanny space and a narrative emerges that is divergent from the intention of the source material.

Referencing a commonly occurring perception delusion, known as pareidolia, (a type of apophenia) that demands us to see order where none exists. She examines the innate tendency of human psychology to find connections, patterns and familiarity in the natural and built environment, celebrating the curious and strangely beautiful.