Artist Statement
The works are an ode to the staining and the materiality of feminism. They demonstrate my desire to paint with technical limitations, where painting becomes an exercise in restraint and quiet consideration. They necessitate a delicate hand. I never allow the paintings to be over worked or laboured. What remains is a very conscious intention to leave images in their magical first conceptions. The paint is allowed and encouraged to stain, this process allows me to then expand my conceptual interests through the abstracted surfaces on the canvas.
I like to blur the lines between domesticity and erotic fantasy,interior space and landscape while allowing ambiguous or ghostly figures to also occupy space. I am interested in navigating my experience of being a woman and single mother. The psychological space of architecture from the 1970s handmade house movement references my early childhood living within an alternative utopian turned dystopian community in New Zealand, as well as my current place of residence in Northern NSW, the home of Australia’s first counter cultural communities.
Artist Bio
Amber Wallis (b. New Zealand,1978) has held solo exhibitions since 2009 in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Wallis’ work has been included in group exhibitions at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (2010), the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2008), the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne (2009), regional institutions including Hazelhurst (2017, 2014), Gippsland (2014, 2019), Tamworth (2013), Lismore (2013) and Bendigo (2008, 2019), Caloundra (2018, 2019). She has recently shown in Los Angeles (Gruin Gallery and SADE) and London (Arusha Gallery).
She has a Bachelor of Visual Arts from the Canberra School of Art and a Master of Visual Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts.
Wallis’ significant career milestones include being awarded the tenth Brett Whiteley Traveling Art Scholarship in 2008, subsequently working in New York, Montreal and completing a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. She was also awarded the Wollumbin Award in 2022 by Tweed Regional Gallery. She has held solo shows at Melbourne Art Fair in 2012, 2018 and Sydney Contemporary in 2022. She is included in Melissa Loughnan’s 2017 Thames & Hudson publication Australiana to Zeitgeist: An A-Z of Contemporary Australian Art and Utopian Slumps: The Collingwood Years 2011 and more recently Australian Abstract by Amber Creswell-Bell. Wallis was featured on the cover of Australian Art Collector issue 58, 2011 and the Artist Profile Melbourne Art Fair Special Edition, 2012, and profiles in 2019, and issue 60 2022.
Her work is held in the Artbank and Arthur Roe Collections as well as various private collections in Australia and internationally.
Amber is represented by Nicholas Thompson Gallery Melbourne and Jan Murphy Gallery Brisbane Australia.
