Painting Encounters With The Land

For the past two years, Amanda Watson has returned to the incubator of post-graduate study to undertake her Masters of Arts (Painting), and this body of work presents her research project’s outcomes.

This work is concerned with the challenge of registering experiences in a holistic manner that integrates multiple levels of experience or modes of representation. Gesture, process, and physically being in environments have become important ways of enabling these encounters to be evident in the paintings, and ‘new materialist theory’ has helped to make sense of the methodology during this inquiry. In view of the trajectory of gesture and process, and in the context of new materialist theory such as Bennett’s and Donna Haraway’s ideas of ‘assemblages’ and ‘borderlands’, Amanda is looking at how gesture can recapture a sense of ‘directness’, and be revitalised from an anthropocentric expression to be used to reveal an encounters between her as artist, environments, and materials.

The body of work here in the exhibition, explores relationship with the land and registers encounters with environments. The paintings have been made by ‘wrapping’ or ‘covering’ surfaces with large pieces of canvas, positioning them over and around masses of rock, parts of trees or organic matter on the ground, or bunched on the studio wall. Once in position, paint was applied and removed, water tipped, and the canvas repositioned to let things between the materials, processes, and territories take place, and the discoveries made while working within the constraints of site and process have become part of each work. Each painting has undergone multiple wrapping and painting occasions, so that layers of encounters from different places and times can build-up and interact to provide a multifarious experience of place.

Ramp Gallery is proud to support Amanda Watson’s Wintec School of Media Arts final Masters submission.