IYA
Team Credits
Photographer Ashley Chappell @flxashstudios
Talents Brenda Mutoni @brendamutoni, Kadia Bah @kadia_b
Stylist Shola Shodipo @thefreestyller
Hair Christina Rendall @christinarendall
Makeup Sasha Lutfullina @sashalutfullina_mua
Artist IG Handle @flxashstudios
Website www.ashley-chappell.com
Named after the Yoruba word for “mother,” IYA is a meditation on origin, remembrance, and the sacred source carried within Black women. The work imagines Black women not simply as subjects, but as embodiments of an inheritance that exists beyond history a living connection to creation, intuition, protection, and spirit.
Through painterly portraiture, fashion, color, and symbolic gesture, I create figures that exist between memory and mythology. Faces are veiled, doubled, or transformed, suggesting identities that are continually unfolding rather than fixed. These photographs are less concerned with documenting reality than with revealing an inner one.
IYA is an invitation to remember that divinity is not something outside of us to be reached, but something already within us to be recognized. In remembering the source, we remember ourselves.
Artist Bio
Ashley Chappell is a photographer working between fine art and editorial photography. After leaving a career in nursing due to complications from lupus, she turned to photography as a way of making sense of grief, memory, and the unseen. Through color, symbolism, and painterly portraiture, she builds imagined worlds that explore Black identity, spirituality, and mythology. Her work has been featured by Vogue, Lenscratch, and Der Greif, and exhibited in Reflections in Black: A Reframing, curated by Deborah Willis. She is represented by Ford Artists and is a member of the Soho House Chicago Creative Incubator.
Artist IG Handle @flxashstudios
Website www.ashley-chappell.com
