Amy Wright

Amy’s electric and heartfelt work is a delicious tribute to her love of the wild.

Amy Wright is a prolific multidisciplinary artist with a diverse background in Painting, Drawing, Textiles and Floral Artistry.

Wright has a preoccupation with capturing abandoned landscapes; the discarded, ignored and untamed. Each canvas holds a world that morphs reality with imagination and myth; plants are depicted wildly and landscapes are tiered and towering with obscured horizon lines.

She works in mixed media - predominately oil, acrylic and prismacolour pencil - and her painting methodology is reminiscent to that of collage, where the whole is made up of cropped fragments, where she playfully toys with the idea of hiding and revealing. Pattern, shape, texture and colour are core to her practice and are used to create a sensory narrative of the landscape.

Amy worked in design studios, lecturered at RMIT, worked as a textile designer as well as creating her own homewares brand, running a retail studio in Prahran and running the floral studio ‘Wunderplant,’ before settling into her calling full-time. All of these earlier practices have woven together to create these explosively personal, tactile and dreamlike pieces.

What do you like to make? And how did your interest in your artform begin?

I am a painter working mainly with the landscape and botanics as my subject matter in mixed media on - oil paint, acrylic paint, ceramic, straw, pencil, charcoal - on canvas. I’ve painted from a very early age. Recently I recalled a memory wandering around the garden with my 2 and 1/2 year old, Maeve, collecting flowers for a posey.

My Grandmother and I would do this same thing on my visits as a small girl, to her home in Newtown Geelong (VIC) - sadly no longer standing. Under her guidance, together we would collect flowers to create a Tussie Mussie that we would take inside to paint in watercolour at her studio desk. She was a wonderful posey painter. As far back as i can remember i have always been a collector and gatherer or plants; flowers and leaves, bark etc. The garden for me has always been my most cherished place.

What is the inspiration for the work you make?

I have been forever drawn to depicting flowers and plants, be it as botanical specimens or in their natural landscapes. Over the years my work has become less literal and more abstracted, as i’ve come to explore landscapes, finding the textures, patterns and colours thrilling.

I am fascinated by capturing the details that would normally go unnoticed. I adore an ‘abandoned’ space where nature has returned and reclaimed man-made structures. I have a bachelor in Textile Design from RMIT, and this methodology of pattern making has definitely informed my painting practice.

My works are in part abstracted with heavy pattern layering and tactile textured surfaces. I am constantly striving to create works that appear to ‘breathe’ and ‘continue to grow’ on a wall.

What are you making during the times of corona lock down?

Corona Time didn’t really affect my daily routine a great deal, as my studio is at home. It was the normal juggle of toddler play and entertainment and painting in snippets when I could. The cut and paste collage art-making certainly ramped up and there is a definite explosion of “Treasure Sticks” in the house!

Treasure sticks are a bit like mobiles. Together we find a strong stick that you hang horizontally. Then go out to collect treasures from the garden or a walk and string them onto the stick with ribbons and twine. They make lovely hanging sculptures and have become a diary of sorts of our days during lockdown.