By Ashlee Temple

The sisters Holly and Ashlee Temple work in mixed media and generate small and large works on canvas and paper, as well as miniature three-dimensional assemblages. Their work often employs imagery culled from the iconography of diverse peoples, eras and beliefs. 

While the Temple sisters often incorporate powerful images from various faiths, these figures and symbols are not intended to endorse religion in the traditional or conventional sense; rather, they are to meant to address our personal and collective relationship with iconography, mythology and the effects of time and culture on the sacred.

Collaboration, both in applied method as well as conceptually, is at the core of their work. The sisters find the implicit trust required by working in tandem to be the most interesting and integral part of their art. Their shared history and aesthetic emerges as a partnership on canvas. It is the sisters’ belief that collaboration — artist-to-artist or art-to-observer — is at the heart of the creative process. Their work deliberately reflects this communion.

 Holly studied art at San Francisco State University, the San Francisco Art Academy and the California State University in Florence, Italy. Ashlee is a graduate of NYU and Yale. Both have spent a lifetime studying under their father, California artist Brook Temple (www.brooktemple.com) and divide their time between Washington DC and San Francisco. When apart, they work independently on the same project, developing separate but parallel designs that are consolidated only when they reunite in the studio.