Painting & Printmaking School of Fine Art
Amelie Moffat
I am a visual artist working across painting, sculpture, and film, with a practice rooted in the celebration of paradox. My work explores the delicate tensions between opposing forces—order and chaos, beauty and abjection, sacredness and profanity—revealing the fragile balance that defines our shared experience. Through the juxtaposition of found objects and traditional media such as oil and ink, I examine how we navigate an overwhelming world saturated with information, emotion, and contradiction.
Texture plays a central role in my process. Up close, my works reveal intricate, mysterious surfaces that stretch perception and evoke vastness within small spaces. These tactile details invite viewers to engage intimately, both visually and psychologically. I am particularly drawn to the human desire to create systems of meaning in the face of uncertainty. In this pursuit, I employ a personal visual language of fabricated symbols—recurring motifs like eggs, dice, and women in ornate dresses—offering an open-ended mythology that runs throughout my practice. With these tools, I create miniature worlds whose cultures consist of confusion and creation.
Ultimately, my work is a search for understanding amid the unpredictable, an attempt to codify the intangible through material form. It reflects both the struggle and the beauty of making sense of chaos.
Series
"Scratching the itch"
Side View of "Sandcastles"
View of "My Split Fish" and "Nobody Wins The Rat Race"
Sandcastles (2025)
My degree show, “Sandcastles”, consists of a series of paintings, sculptures, and light installations. I am interested in embodying paradoxes simultaneously, as I think that this is more accurate to the truth than a separation of “opposing forces” such as birth and decay, beauty and abjection, beginning and end. Breathing life into disregarded objects, I use whatever I can get my hands on as a base to facilitate my world-building. Adopting things that I find that were meant to be mine and giving them happy new homes. The objects decide where they want to be, communicating by sending me visions of creatures. I try to celebrate the impermanence and the consistency of iterations as a rule. I do this by painting, glueing and sewing things onto other things. Each piece is an attempt to create an item of ultimate value as a gift for myself, but no matter how beautiful or serious I try to make it, the work always looks back at me with a wink. This is probably because I rub dust and glitter into all of it. I ground my exaggerated illustrations with the free texture afforded to me by things that have been aged over time. There is a beauty that can only be achieved by something being affected repeatedly and consistently throughout time, like the rings in a tree or the marks on a school desk. I am endlessly inspired by the way that this looks and feels, because it contains a beginning, middle, and end all at once. As I allow these narratives to unfold, one after another, a tower made of women emerges to remind me that cake tastes worse with mould on it, but looks a lot better.
