Artist in Focus: Amy Wright
We’re excited to present Above and Below, a new body of work by Victorian artist Amy Wright. This series explores Wright’s preoccupation with her garden as her sanctuary, solace and ever-giving source of inspiration during isolation. A celebration of strength, perseverance and continuance is reflected in many patterns and textures that emanate with exuberant abandon.
Dates:
20 January - 29 January, 2022
Location:
Online and in store, 311 Smith St, Fitzroy.
Amy Wright works in mixed media – predominately oil, acrylic and prismacolour pencil – and her painting methodology is reminiscent to that of collage, where the whole is made up of cropped fragments. Pattern, shape, texture and colour are core to her practice and create a sensory narrative of the landscape.
Over the past couple of years, the simple, the close, and once mundane have taken on a new reverence. From this shift, a new daily ritual has emerged for Wright and her daughter where they explore the plants, the grasses, the insects, the weeds; learning through habitually tending to their little plot of paradise. Getting their hands in the soil, digging down, planting and watching what grows, bursting above the surface.
In Above and Below, inspiration is found in the lesser noticed details of Wright’s garden. The patterns that snails leave behind, the shedding of the Acacia trees; their feet blanketed with ochre leaves. The endless discovering of pottery pieces from who knows when and the grip of the vines as they twist across their bamboo frames.
The garden embraces all senses. I’ve slowly become attune, not only to the visual delights, but the scents, the sounds, the sensations that the garden emits.”
This body of work has seen Wright introducing Silk into this collection of work to increase the tactility, while creating a variable dimension, through its touch, its translucence, and its weightlessness. The movement of the silk panels is tamed at points on the canvas and kept unfettered at others, in an attempt to echo the sensory experience of the garden. The works are can be affected by and reactive to their environments. A lightness of touch, a gentle breeze creates a variable sensory experience beyond the merely visual.
Wright was a finalist in the ‘Little Things Art Prize’ at Saint Cloche Gallery and the ‘John Leslie Art Prize’ at Gippsland Gallery, and has exhibited in several group and solo shows around Australia.
She lives with her partner Steve and their daughter Maeve near the Bellarine Peninsula in Victoria, where she enjoys working from her garden studio.
We look forward to welcoming Amy Wright as our Artist in Focus . You will find all the works below and proudly displayed in our showroom from 20 January.
