Lindsey Brashler

Lindsey Brashler (b. 1980) identifies as a neurodivergent artist, scholar, partner, and mother of three. Brashler’s introduction to and appreciation of art and aesthetics began with inspiration from their great grandmother, painter Louise Brettner Osbourne, an early 20th century artist of the Ashcan movement. Consistently a conceptual artist of sorts, Lindsey has worked in a wide variety of media with narrative themes primarily exploring her relationship with trauma, memory, the body, and psyche expressed through intimate portrayals of metal sculpture and metal body adornment while also devoting her attention to beauty, whimsy and joy.

Prior to joining Project Onward, Lindsey had taken a hiatus from art-making to focus on her career as a clinical social worker. After long advocating for others, she found her life force depleted and left their practice. Focusing on recovery and their role as a mother, Lindsey found herself further separated from the creative self. Following what they refer to as a “second chapter life overhaul”, Lindsey joined Project Onward in 2024 and returned to regular art practice, a kind of coming out of art-making retirement. Reflecting on where they’re at in life and where she’s been, Ms. Brashler is not only honoring her identity as an artist, but also the duality and complexity of identity and life experiences. Being diagnosed with neurodivergences played a huge part in their self-discovery. They’ve allocated artistic expressions of pain and joy into separate bodies of work, much as she does at Project Onward.

Initially creating colorful, often somewhat frenetic drawings, she further states “When I create, it’s completely free-form. I have no plan. I trust how my brain works and let it take me on a journey.” She has since ventured into more expressive and brooding drawings of familiar figurative forms, intuitively pulled towards deeply-rooted reflections on grief and trauma. Painting has become a catharsis to allow manifestation of new and more visceral representations of memory. Images of mold, flesh, blood, and rot are intuitively free-associated while punctuating her process with abstract paintings that bring her joy and lightness as she makes them. 

“Dark work is a form of catharsis where I can take rumination and manifest it in a piece of art. The relationship to the feeling changes because I then become an observer of that feeling. No longer bound to experiencing it. When it’s finished, the end result is of a process that I can share and offer with others. But I also love color. It’s a life force. And when I have a strong life force, I make colorful work.”