A little info about me....

Artists Statement

I love beauty, freedom and adventure.

I'm interested in the boundaries relating to freedom of expression around desire and sensuality, and how they are impacted by societal expectations and taboos.

Creating distorted, dream-like representations of untethered beauty, desire, freedom and energy, either in figurative or pure abstract form, my work seeks to achieve a balance between loose expression and technical rigour.

Exploring and celebrating the multiple emotional states between strong and vulnerable, innocent and guilty, wholesome and suggestive, liberated and oppressed.

My work is about freedom and empowerment. I use a multi-disciplinary approach to creating, choosing materials that elicit certain sensual responses;

luscious creamy paints, indelible ink stains, torn collage papers, scratched surfaces, shimmering metallics. The end result aspiring to create beautiful, uplifting pieces that celebrate the beauty in women and their freedom to express themselves fully.

A little about me....

At the age of eleven I moved away from home to train, full-time, as a professional dancer and so much of my life has been spent learning to express emotion without words.

As a child, I spent lots of time in solitude, sketching and savouring every moment - it was pure contentment.

I continued to draw and paint throughout my dance training but then as I graduated, lost touch with my art.

As a Catholic, I was exposed to society's expectations of women, relationships and desire. What was 'permissible' and what wasn't.

This contradicted what felt natural to me and so for a long time I wrestled with what society expects vs what felt like a true expression of who I was, both in terms of desire, ambition and intimacy.

Many years passed and during that time I travelled the world, studied for a Masters Degree in Business, set up two successful businesses of my own, got married (and divorced!), had two beautiful boys and learnt many, many lessons.

Like so many others, life, responsibilities and other people’s expectations of me got in the way.

As I got older however I realised that there was a deep yearning inside for more.

After years of soul-searching I discovered that it was a call back to art. The longer I tried to ignore it, the worse it got until eventually after a long period of burnout I decided to honour what my gut was trying to tell me.

I made some changes in my life, studied everything I could to do with art…the foundations, abstraction, realism, colour theory and everything in between until I finally got to a place where I felt at home.

Every day that I moved closer to art, that emptiness inside started to disappear.

These days I get to make art every day and I feel deeply, truly happy.

I’m also privileged to use my twenty years of business experience to help other artists learn how they can build and run, profitable and sustainable creative businesses.

The fact I get to combine the two things I love, I am eternally grateful for.

So in a nutshell, that’s a little about my life and how I ended up here.

Thank you for stopping by.

Amanda