Ashley Larkin
Ashley Larkin is a multidisciplinary textile artist, psychotherapist and mindfulness teacher based in Nashville, Tennessee. Raised in the mountains of Virginia, she inherited a family lineage of sewing passed down through generations of Black women. Her practice continues that lineage, bringing together contemporary quilting and mindfulness to explore the art of self-recovery.
Larkin began her career as a fashion designer in New York City before spending more than a decade practicing psychotherapy and embracing motherhood. Often working with textile remnants and visible mending, Larkin creates layered works that function as bells of mindfulness. In contemplative traditions, a bell gently invites practitioners back to the present moment. Her work extends that same invitation, calling viewers back to remember truths we so often forget. It offers an empathetic witness to our human experience, inviting deeper relationships with change, grief, repair and the possibility of beginning again.
Every year, Larkin builds a new body of work around a single question drawn from her own life and years of sitting with others in therapy. These annual inquiries become exhibitions, writing and community practices that invite us to reflect together and practice another way of being with the beauty, suffering and ever-changing texture of life.
