Amy Blackbourne

There is a curious space between earth and spiritual realm, between the seen world and the unseen world. This sacred earth invites exploration.

As an artist, I work across mediums that float between 2D and 3D, to allude to this further dimension. I am based in Glasgow, from Northern Ireland. Thus, my practice is visually rooted where the movement of the city meets quiet natures, and in the short sea between their coastlines.

I use my sketches and writings of these spaces to form visual framework over which I can experiment with. This happens through a variety of methodologies: printmaking; paint; ceramics; woodwork and drawing. Through these, I lean into the ambiguity of familiar city and landscapes shapes as the subject. I amalgamate these recognisable motifs, such as houses, motorways and trees, with automatic mark-making and text, depicting the invisible realm, creating spaces that feel both familiar and vastly unknown.

The continuity of cadmium red monoprint provides continuity across these worlds, the chaos contained by boundaries of hand-crafted wooden structures. Whilst varied, texture and materiality are crucial to my practice; I opt to use found materials, where possible, and process wild clay to sculpt with from my family home. The act of using the physical turf I know innately, in a city I have learnt to know, complicates the intertwining motifs of these places further. It also allows the range of speeds in everyday life to be narrated, and paused, in my practice.

I employ physical metaphors in my practice, inviting a viewer into these paces and places with light humour and cultural references. Using widely understood analogies such as space, chess or telegraph poles intertwined in the work, I can convey large, conceptual ideas in simpler terms. My intention is not to squeeze the mysteries of the universe into my work, but deliberately simplify and fracture, to lure the viewer into deeper curiosity of spiritual activity and dynamics in the spaces around them.