Amanda Rae
Email: wiredbird@hotmail.com
http://www.amandajrae.com
“For the artist communication with nature remains the most essential condition. The artist is human; himself nature; part of nature within natural space.” Paul Klee (1879-1940)
The philosophical and political narratives of both feminism and post-feminism have heavily influenced my work and development as an artist, leading me to constantly question and re-evaluate not just the marginalised role of women in western society, but also that of the environment, side-lined by big business and mankind’s constant desire for ownership.
The use of mannequins within assemblage has also become an important aspect in my work due to their unsettling representations of the human form, the disturbing sense of the unheimlich which they create. Through these sometimes surreal associations, I explore the sense of liminality inherent in the world, the constant flux that is experienced on a daily basis. The French ethnologist, Arnold van Gennep described these modulations as “liminality, the transitional time or condition in which one, or a group, or a territory, or the season, is not what it was and not what it will become, but something in between, something marginal, vague, and flexible”. Due to its ambivalent nature, assemblage brings together a variety of dissimilar things and creates something wholly new and different from their reconstruction, creating a new narrative out of an old one. From the juxtaposition of idea and object, within an unheimlich form, the ambiguities of thought are captured and new connections made.