Louise Ashcroft

Queer Keepie Uppies / video

Louise Ashcroft and Juliet Jacques present a video compilation of their queer, trans and non-binary friends doing 'keepie uppie' football kick ups. This work was made to acknowledge that professional sport still excludes anyone who is not a cis gendered male or female.

Louise and Juliet are collecting videos. If you are also queer, trans or non-binary and want to send a video of your keepie uppie football skills, please email your video to L.ashcroft@gold.ac.uk Your video should be in mp4 format (or any phone video format) and up to one minute long. The compilation is updated regularly.

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Transfer Window / sticker

This sticker features faces of female football players cut out of the small UK publication 'Women's Football News'. It has a transparent background so that it can be placed over the sports page of any newspaper which fails to include enough women's sport. 

In UK newspapers, the number of articles on women’s sport has increased hugely in the last ten years, as well as the amount of page space allocated to them, and their online prominence. Newspaper print space for women's sport went from an average of 2% in 2013 to 30% in 2022, the year the England Women's team won the Euros.

If you see a newspaper whose pages are dominated by men's sport, this playful tool lets you 'hack' the news to insert female faces.

Texts: Louise Ashcroft

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David Beckham's Cleaning Job / video

Using a free AI image generator, artist Louise Ashcroft imagines David Beckham supporting his football career with a job in England's Women's Super League. Women's football in England only went fully professional in 2018. Before that, female football stars who played for their country and top English teams often had to work other paid jobs.

In her autobiography, former Arsenal and England 'Lionesses' legend Alex Scott describes working in the Arsenal laundry room cleaning the socks of the men's team. Top Women's Super League players now earn an average of about £47,000 per year compared with their male equivalents who earn over £300,000 per week!

The video can be seen in the BraUturm. Placed in the immediate vicinity of the shrine with objects by Renate Breß. One of them is a glittering purse - the only reward the Dortmund-born player received in her entire career as a left-back in the first women's national football team.

Text: Louise Ashcroft/Linda Schröer

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Louise Ashcroft (1983 in Bradford, West Yorkshire, lives and works in London) studied at Oxford University, Birkbeck, and the Royal College of Art, London, and makes performances, objects, and projects that address social and political issues in playful ways. Her works on the subject of football's hidden players were made during a residency in 2024 at OOF Gallery in Tottenham Hotspur Football Club's stadium in London. She has recently performed at Bauhaus Museum, Dessau, and Garden Museum, London; with past group shows / performances at Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem; VIERNULVIER, Ghent; Camden People’s Theatre; Hypha Studios, London; Künstlerhaus Bremen; and BQ, Berlin. Ashcroft teaches art at Goldsmiths University, London, and is a cofounder of the peer-led art school AltMFA (est. 2010).*

www.louiseashcroft.org
www.julietjacques.com

Translation: Matthias Fabry
Photo: Christa Holka, 2024