Amanda Blake
‘The Minimal and the Material’
Visual artist, workshop tutor and lecturer in painting at Carmarthen School of Art
Working with fresco and ancient traditional mediums to explore how materiality and process in painting can contribute to thinking around Nature, our relationship with our environment and issues surrounding sustainability, value and care.
I work with solely natural raw materials and pigments as a conscious choice that has evolved through a practice in buon fresco, and a thinking that stems from its limestone base, its ancient palette and the preciousness of earth. Early exploration of fresco’s qualities led to an interest in the perceptual in painting - how particular tensions between tactile and visual space can ellicit a deeply contemplative experience, and lead to a sense of ‘presentness’ or ‘being’.
The slow nature of finding and preparing pigments, building up painting grounds and polishing surfaces by hand allow a deep intimacy to develop with the materials, and through it, a natural thinking on the materials themselves - their direct relation to the land and the questions that arise - on what we use, where it comes from, and what impact this has.
The work is minimal in nature and intent, which feels more and more necessary in light of our environment - both for using less and for a simple ‘letting be’ of what is.
Using stone and earth pigments, local chalk, home-made charcoal, upcycled silver or gold leaf, and the juxtaposition of the local, or found alongside the traditional or precious - alabaster and lapis lazuli, for example. Paring down the components of early painting and drawing mediums to allow them to touch, sometimes conceptually, sometimes spatially and sometimes through both.
For a pause in the present moment, for noticing, and for a thinking that follows - where associations or questions can arise around sustainability, value and care, and choices of how we might do things differently.
Amanda Blake, 2024