Amanda Guest

My work emerges from the experience of growing up in homes designed by my father, a British modernist architect. The formal language I inhabited and the experiences in those spaces formed the basis of my artistic vocabulary.

Development of imagery may be incremental or impulsive. Some works are part of a series, marking time, while others are unique, allowing collaged shapes to move into abstraction. They explore rigidity and fluidity, movement within and away from the grid. Pages are spaces/sites inhabited by lines traced by thread, cut paper, paper pulp, and pencil.

Collaboration with Dieu Donne Papermill allowed me to use the papermaking process to investigate these impulses, to embed lines in sheets as they are made, or allow the paper to sculpt itself as it dries against restraint.

In installations, paper “pieces” are collaged directly on the wall, in dialog with the architectural space. The imagery moves through grid systems to idiosyncratic drawings, referring to existence within those beautiful, monochrome, light-filled spaces; the paper pages are surrogates for sites of experience.

Photo Credit:
Maceo Thompson (they/them), Images 1-5
Sophie Bahari Bomeisler, Images 6-10