In the halls of the Royal Holloway University, or maybe with a group of friends on a stroll in the streets of London, you’ll find a young woman who is trying to get her art out for the world to see. Venus Ashue, this 20 years old literature student, isn’t only a skillful writer but she’s also a passionate and innovative photographer and filmmaker. Her artwork consisting of a collection of photo portraits, poetry, and 1 minute short movies serves as ways to channel the beauty and the reality of life which is not often represented and they can be found everywhere from TikTok to Instagram. But now, she’s taking her work to the next level, with her newest short film called « Grown-up ». We went directly to the source to try and learn more about Venus Ashu and how her creative mind works.
Q: Considering that your main field of study is literature, How did you start working in filming and photography?
A: Okay so, yes I started with literature because I just wanted to be a storyteller, I’ve been telling stories for a long time, I grew up doing it. Since the age of ten, I would read a lot and just write little things and then it became something I was serious about. Then at around the end of sixth form, I saw a lot of my friends studying photography and I liked the fact that they could do all these things with photos, so I wanted to experiment and try using photography as another way to tell stories.
Q: How do you combine all of these fields throughout your projects to create your specific brand of art?
A: Funnily enough, a lot of my inspiration does come from other works of arts, sometimes music and sometimes film but a lot of times it comes from what I study of English literature. For example, Venus, one of my self-portraits [the pink one], was named after the poem Adonis and Venus by Shakespeare which we studied in class. You wouldn’t think of it, but something in that poem bought an idea to life and I was just like « yeah, I need to tell this story through photography ». So a lot of it intertwine and influence my ideas, And vice versa, my photography influence what I write.
Q: From where do you draw the inspiration you use for your work?
A: Oof, anything that just sparks my imagination. A lot of it comes from studying different forms of literature but it also comes from films and music videos. For example, f the world music video, that gave me the idea of doing my own short movie, grown-up. A kind of montage-y … what’s the word…mémoire short film. For my photography, again, it can literally be anything, from my friends to a moment that happened in my life, or like, [laughter] a scene from Narcos if you guys are familiar with that show. It starts with a plethora of treads, of ideas from everywhere and I see what I can make of them.
Q: What can you tell us about your newest short movie and what audience do you seek to reach with it?
A: My short film, it’s a coming of age, teen movie. I think it’s a genre I really like because there’s just so much going on with teenagers that people don’t understand. It’s more than just the parties and the romance and this kind of…rebellious nature. It’s a lot more, it’s the stage in life where everything is just chaotic and you’re just trying to find your feet and there‘s just so much going on. So with this short film, I really want to explore that with relationships and how it’s very difficult for teenagers to establish relationships when they’re trying to find themselves and how narcissism is involved and how toxic it can become with this whole « me, me, me » looking for my self thing. That’s a big theme we want to talk about with this short film and what I really love about this project is that we want to be able to include loads of different people. My first short film was a lot of just my friends and people that I knew but this time I wanna work with new creators, people I have no ideas about and just be able to network with new people and showcase new talents because I feel that, that is a really important thing especially for creators of color. I really want to use TikTok as a form of advertising for it because even though It will be on YouTube, I want to be able to bring as much traffic as possible and just keep on gaining a bigger audience because these stories need to be told, especially from the perspective of creator of color. I definitely want it to be a big thing, I don’t want it to be an annual thing of just always doing these massive projects with a whole new casting crew to just completely tell new stories with new faces etcetera.
Q: what do you wish to achieve through your artworks, both in the short and the long run?
A: The reason that I do anything and the reason why I am a storyteller and do what I do, at the core, is because I want to help people and change their life. I feel like art has the ability to move us to do wonders, to move someone to feel and I think once we have the feeling, the emotions, that is energy in motion. And energy makes up everything around us and that’s just physics. Everything around us is energy and once someone has that energy, it moves them to do things, it’s a domino effect. if I’m putting out a positive message, that initiates change, then that will allow someone else to also initiate change too. I feel that this is so important in this society where everything is just … absolute crap [laughter]. At times it feels like nothing is changing but art can do that for you. It has done that for me in the past. When I watched the TV show when they see us, that absolutely moved me to tears. That energy moved me to be focused on creating art for people of color And by doing that I’m giving other people a voice. By giving people a voice they are able to express themselves which will help someone else do the same. Do you see what I mean by the domino effect? I think once we start creating art as a message, something that moves people, that makes the world a better place, that’s all we can do really [laughter], that’s a really, really amazing way to leave our footprints in the sand and allow others to do the same and join this whole journey of positivity and love and shedding light on the voices of other people. That’s what I wish to do with my art.
You can find Venus Ashu on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and her website :
golden cult 