Amanda Thackray
Painted net study 2

Media: Hand pigmented cotton paper pulp
Size: 23" x 32" x 0.75"
$900

Artist Statement:
I employ hand papermaking processes as a primary medium in my practice to create complex imagery referencing microscopia. I derive the content for my work through lengthy periods of research, guided by the tenuous relationship between the utility and detritus of human-made artifacts, focusing on our burden of plastic waste. I am equally terrified and fascinated by the ability of plastic to break down into smaller and smaller microplastics, while never actually degrading.

My research into the pervasiveness of plastics in our environments and our bodies is visualized as large scale installations of quasi-fictional landscapes. Explored through simulacra of handmade paper, projects telescope between the spaces of the microscopic human body and the vastness of worldwide bodies of water. These dimensional landscapes present themselves as detailed yet ambiguous fiber studies and fictitious maps of overwhelming polluted ocean. I utilize imagery of netting to convey multilayered references attributed to both organic bodily material and human-made, rigid, immortal plastic - the net is a malleable grid concurrently acting as a trap and a sieve.

Through working with handmade paper, I engage with water - often site-specific water - to create imagery that is directly tied, both materially and conceptually, to that same water. Revealing a murky space occupying parallel bodies - human bodies and bodies of water - this narrative foreshadows new territory for my practice and begins to build a conceptual bridge between microplastics-polluted waterways and human bodies filled with the same microscopic plastics.

Biography

Amanda Thackray is a multidisciplinary artist and educator, based in Newark, NJ, whose practice sits at the intersection of craft, sculpture, and environmentally-based social practice. Thackray’s projects have been exhibited at The Newark Museum, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, The Montclair Art Museum, The NARS Foundation, and The Knockdown Center. She is the recipient of a 2020 Creative Catalyst Fund Artist Fellowship. She has been awarded numerous residencies including The Arctic Circle in Svalbard, Norway, and artist-in-residence at the Museum of Art and Design in NYC. Her work is in over a dozen public collections including The Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, Mediatheque Andre Malraux, France, Yale University, and The Library of Congress. She teaches printmaking at SUNY Purchase and Rutgers University. Thackray earned her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.

http://ajthackray.com/