Ashleigh Hobbs, known by her artist name Arnika, is a multidisciplinary artist and musician working across sound and performance, expanded through self-portraiture and installation. Her practice explores femininity, bodily autonomy, and the ways internalised ideals shape the female body and psyche.

 Drawing on personal narrative, her work examines how identity is formed under social expectations of beauty, desirability, and control. Through music, image-making, and sculptural forms, she creates immersive environments that move between seduction and unease, where the body becomes both subject and site of tension.

 During the final term of her six-month residency at GlogauAIR, Hobbs is developing Doll, Interrupted, a performance and installation, which is an extension of her previous work Inherited Hunger, an interdisciplinary project exploring the emotional and cultural inheritance of restriction. The work considers how shame, survival strategies, and ideas of worth are passed through familial and societal structures, shaping relationships to desire and the body.

The project combines original music, self-portraiture, installation, photography, and sculptural elements, including stretched fabrics and body-like forms. Together, these materials construct a psychological landscape in which the body appears both present and dissonant: suspended between visibility and disappearance, agency and objectification.