ARTIST STATEMENT
I create uncanny works that oscillate between sculpture and painting using images culled predominantly from the realms of National Geographic magazines. My works explore the circulation of pictures across various conditions and mediums throughout contemporary social networks, and embodied experience, devising intricate techniques to make this state of flux tangible. I use a variety of visual techniques—including reflective surfaces, inanimate objects, and collage—to distort and even disable the compositional relationships that underpin traditional modes of perspectival representation in painting. My practise is predicated on the objecthood of painting with the frame and physical extensions that play with virtual and actual space. I intentionally use the illusionistic and tactile properties of painting to emphasise interactivity, offering a startling duplexity to the contemporary image—comprising the subjective and the objective, the internal and the external, the real and fictitious.
Integrating distinct forms of sensory experience, the work explores the enigmas of aesthetic practises and appearance of implicit subjectivity, addressing a dichotomy in the way we process and consume information. My paintings feature inanimate objects (like pipes and acrylic plastic) that pique my aesthetic interest, and as a result, they veer between historical medium and superfluous commercial merchandise. Consequently, the appearances of the images depicted in my work are perpetually informed by past and future conditions and are haunted as such by the objects trace. My paintings' titles are both alluring and empty; they seem to capitalise on the individuality of each object while also tending towards the universal, as if the bite of the image's imminent transmission through numerous media networks were eating away at the subject's singular core.
Amy Powell was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1995. Powell attended Cardiff School of Art and Design graduating with a Bachelor of Arts with Honours degree in Fine Art in July 2019. In 2019 she had her first commercial gallery exhibition at Cardiff’s MADE gallery and was nominated for the Eversheds Sutherland Prize for Painting. In 2015 she was awarded the Placement Bursary award for a six-month placement at La Trobe University, Australia. Since graduating she has brought creativity to work within a professional landscape of contemporary practice through providing painting workshops, tutorials, artist talks, and seminars. In 2021 she was selected as Artist in Residence at Woldingham School and intends to extend the discipline of her practice by continuing her studies with an MA in Fine Art: Painting at Camberwell College of Art, University of the Arts London, commencing September 2022.