Public Seminar: Amanda Watson - Painting with places and people

THURS 12 AUGUST, 12.00 – 1.00 PM, P152, DUNEDIN SCHOOL OF ART, RIEGO STREET, DUNEDIN  

Amanda Watson

Painting with places and people: Exploring the idea of working collaboratively to see places in unexpected ways

Paintings and other symbolised image systems contribute to the way we see and understand the world, however accurate or flawed they may be. I am interested in how to make paintings that allow environments to be creative protagonists rather than passive objects of representation. My painting practice involves engaging with geographical places by wrapping surfaces of the land found there, and as a result the canvas records my encounters with it over time and reveals exchanges between myself as an artist and the outside and studio environments in the context of “new-materialist” theory. The paintings yield a dense and complex view of place and make manifest the relationships between process, gesture, environments, and myself, and in this way reveal experience of place in unexpected ways. In this presentation I will share my current thoughts about how this idea can be extended to a collaborative approach in the making process of paintings by including bystanders, locals, and friends, and how that might affect the recording of encounters of place and our understandings of it.

Amanda Watson is a visual artist, researcher and educator who is curious about the world we live in and how we communicate about places and geographies. She was awarded a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, where she majored in painting, a Postgraduate Diploma in Museum Studies from Massey University, and a Master of Arts with Distinction in Painting from Waikato Institute of Technology. Her work has been exhibited and shared through exhibitions, awards, editorials and published reviews in New Zealand and overseas and accessioned into public and private collections.