Amanda Welch is a London-based artist whose practice has moved from painting through to mixed-media installation and assemblage. She first visited Shetland in 2005. An experience while walking to the Culswick Broch was the germ for the Shetland works which form a large part of the Conditions exhibition. She says, "I recognised these Culswick cliffs as the imaginary landscape of a group of paintings made decades earlier". Eight years later she at last felt able to act on this insight, not directly but through an existing preoccupation in her work with maps. Maps are used as templates in several works and offer a covert engagement with place – landscapes by stealth. Her most recent work, Gordi Stack, leaves aside the map and is more directly concerned with the changing relationships of the walked landscape. Amanda will be resident at the lighthouse throughout May and sees this exhibition as a work in progress. Maybe Gordi Stack will prove a possible direction towards a Culswick work or maybe the experience of living and working on Bressay will lead her somewhere else entirely…
Throughout June installation artist Vicki Fleck will be in residence at the lighthouse and will create work in response to Amanda's show. Her practice considers ideas about the natural world and the human response to landscape and nature. www.shetlandarts.org/our-work/exhibitions
