Exploring emotions, zen and the spices of life, Amylia’s artistic investigations makes its debut in the sixth installation of our EMERGE project: ‘Warisan’. The six pieces in the exhibition boasts nearly every color you can think of and a wealth of detail woven into mandalas which are a main feature in all of her works up on display. This debut marks a new achievement for her as a new and emerging artist having only began an all out pursuit of her passion in art since 2016. In a conversation I had asked the who, why, where, when, how of her relationship with art and it all began with a realisation in 2013 when, while observing her daughter, “I remembered watching my young daughter painting at the dining table with some new watercolours and brushes that I bought for her, so I decided to join in.”
Then after Amylia began to explore and develop her own technique and style as most other local artists do, through the process of being 'self-taught'. This method of developing artistic practice tends to put me off especially when I get portfolios from local artists that either have substandard techniques and the near absolute absence of the ability to conceptualize. What I found noteworthy about her practice is that she could systematically recount to me where influences were coming from, who she was looking at for techniques and what impressed me most, is that she has a methodology for recording her work and experiments. For those who aren’t too familiar with an artist’s practice, think about great masterpieces, now rewind and let's try to understand the nitty gritty process of getting the perfect composition and color palette. They didn’t just paint everything on the first try, countless sketches come before numerous drafts of paintings to make manual edits to put wandering limbs in the right place and facial expressions to emulate the desired mood. It’s like photoshop without all those wonderful automated functions and ctrl + z.
Now back to Amylia’s work, ‘Zen’ is how I would conclusively describe her art. The effect washes over you as a viewer and as you get in closer to appreciate the level of detail in different components you realize it’s almost akin to reading chapters of a story book and that each component can be a character in it's own. The artist’s works features several mandalas enveloped by a background of starry cosmos or a psychedelic spectrum like something you’d probably see on an astral trip. Atlantis is one of my personal favorites out of the six currently exhibited in the gallery. The piece has a fantasy element where waves, galaxies and mandalas meet and create the perfect place you would imagine for eukaryotic organisms come to party (feel free to disagree with me or even expand on this perception).
I look forward to the development of Amylia’s practice and hopefully to see experimentation on the dimensions she works with, how she would then negotiate details, what new influences will come to play and the growth of her technical ability. You can get your #satisfying art fix of seeing artworks materialize from start to finish on her channel where she updates frequently on a weekly basis:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUSWLrTKIP2lPjZaHHMSrXg