Amanda Lilleston

Statement

My work explores interconnected systems of biology and physiology. Our bodies are open systems that continually interact with the landscapes we inhabit. I actively integrate human beings into the larger ecosystem by collaging prints of organs, tissues, and other human anatomy into botanical or zoological forms. My work as an artist explores the mutuality between the world and the bodies it continually shapes. Using drawing, relief carving, and printing, I transform imagery of the body or landscape into adapting forms and structures. Since becoming a parent, I have been thinking about these themes in relation to time.

Artworks

In the haze of early parenthood, as I held my daughter, I found myself imagining my mother holding me and her mother holding her. I have been re-experiencing my childhood, and my mothers’ childhood, all through my daughter and son. This sense of time passing, but a more overwhelming sense of time looping, drove me to create these woodcut prints of shared experiences through my family over the generations. I recognized how my kids are iterations of our family, our cells, our DNA. I started thinking about a Möbius strip as a narrative structure: a loop with a single twist--a one-sided, one edge, looping in time.