A YEAR OF WALKING

Amanda's painting practice is influenced by her experiences in the local landscape of Kur-rin-gai and the Northern Beaches in Sydney. She finds inspiration through bushwalking and swimming, where she immerses herself in nature, allowing it to touch all her senses.

Her artistic approach is process-driven and continuously evolving. She applies and removes layers of paint, giving her artwork the opportunity to transform over an extended period. Amanda makes intuitive and logical choices for each layer, revisiting the surface over weeks or months until the work reaches its final form.

The resulting abstractions often represent the landscape as a place that could be recognised but also the sensed experience of it. Instead of concealing marks, Amanda aims to integrate the underneath marks through gestures of sanding techniques. She preserves traces of the paintings' evolution through transparent painting layering, where each layer rendezvous with the next.

Exploring the natural world is central to Amanda's work. She evokes opposites like ‘thinness and density,’ ‘transparency and opacity,’ and ‘stillness and movement’ to capture the many ways we experience the landscape around us. The layers in her paintings also mimic the layers of time passing, memories and marks left on the environment from fauna, flora and human intervention.

This process of addition and subtraction is crucial to Amanda's practice, as it allows her to reveal and honour the painting's history. The paintings acquire their own presence, reflecting the places where Amanda has spent time.