Amanda Small

I signify my ideas about a living web through metaphor, using sacred geometry, radials, and lattice patterns to reference architecture found within living structures. Repetitive patterns common in nature act as an allegory for a collective identity, and reference the inter-connectedness of living things. Technology allows us intimate views of otherwise invisible worlds. Our relationship with nature is vastly explored and exploited through this technology. Complex patterns of unfolding symmetry depict continuity in the organization of the elaborate cellular structures within each living organism. Correlations between patterns in nature, nature in art, and art in technology and the evolution of this interface are current themes I am interested in.  Parallel symmetries found beneath the surface of organisms suggest kinships beyond comprehension. Simultaneously, my employment of unfired clay and slip remind us that our own subjectivity and relationships to each other and our surroundings are in flux.

Systems, both real and imagined, create intricate maps implying both a literal and figurative reference to collective history and identity. I am interested in how patterning, and use or recognition of patterning, can act as a catalyst to talk about ideas pertaining to unity, collective identity, history and place. Here, patterning takes on the important role as an interface between physicality and cosmology. Cell structures, tissue, bone, plants, and seeds offer complex worlds of webbed correlation. Color and texture combine to mimic the rich and varied surfaces layered within each organism.  With microanalysis these common natural phenomena become a fantastic landscape of intricately connected links of unfolding organic architecture. Delicate layers arranged in undulating patterns reference internal structures found in nature, biology, and plant life, while discussing the relationships between our selves, our technology, and our subsequent experience of nature and each other.