Amanda Houchen
Amanda Houchen’s work looks at the relationship between illusionism and abstraction. Amanda plays with the spatial properties of the painting through formal decisions of division, colour and light. She is interested in achieving optical illusion through the placement of flat geometric architectural shapes, fused with more organic forms and structures: underwater plants, internal cell like structures, costume, fabrics, decorative patterns, the tropical and exotic.
Her paintings tap into a sense of otherness; worlds within worlds, mirroring and yet upsetting what is outside. Houchen is keen to create spaces that cannot easily be contextualised, exploring settings that convey artifice; they are mysterious, disorientating, and kaleidoscopic. Through a use of vivid colour, rhythm and depth, she confronts the viewer with an ambiguous sense of place.
The handmade and sense of touch play a critical part in her process. Each painting is a performative act and an enquiry into unknown space. Amanda is not certain of what the outcome will be but interested in creating a particular type of environment through colour and shape, following an intuitive process. She starts the painting freely with gestural mark making using acrylic paint, then overworking this with more geometric hard edged abstract forms. She uses a specific kind of layering, inviting the viewer to look through each to the next, almost as a series of screens so that each layer of paint contrasts in style to the next and creates a dialogue between them.
Check out Amanda’s work below!
