Amber Wallis

Ivy and Other

2022 Oil on Linen 60 x 60 cm unframed

The works are an ode to the staining and the materiality of feminism. They demonstrate my desire to paint with technical limitations, where painting becomes an exercise in restraint and quiet consideration. They necessitate a delicate hand. I never allow the paintings to be over worked or laboured. What remains is a very conscious intention to leave images in their magical first conceptions. The paint is allowed and encouraged to stain, this process allows me to then expand my conceptual interests through the abstracted surfaces on the canvas. I like to blur the lines between domesticity and erotic fantasy, interior space and landscape while allowing ambiguous or ghostly figures to also occupy space. I am interested in navigating my experience of being a woman and single mother. The psychological space of architecture from the 1970s handmade house movement references my early childhood living within an alternative utopian turned dystopian community in New Zealand, as well as my current place of residence in Northern NSW, the home of Australia’s first counter cultural communities.