Sculpture

Cast resin boat on coffee table. Approx 1.15m high x 36cm x 70cm
Ceramic and galvanised steel. Approx. 2.5m high
Installation, approx. 40 stainless steel and plastic damselflies. Damselfly wingspan 84 cm
Cast aluminium and stainless steel. Approx. 60cm diameter
Bronze snail, galvanised instruments in concrete ‘trail’. Snail 1.25m long, trail 20m long
Aluminium. 1.9m x 2.4m x 1.7m
Cast aluminium fishing boat, tea trolley, galvanised net and resin crabs. 1.7m long x 1.12m high x 80cm
Ceramic and steel. Each salmon approx. 75cm long
Welded steel, cast resin and iron. Approx. 6m high
Dinner plates, painted steel and ceramic fish. 2.1m x 1.5m x 1.2m
Ceramic with bottles. 90cm x 50cm x 50cm.
Aluminium. 2.5m x 1.35m x 1.4m
Ceramic, lights and toys. 75cm x 32cm x 40cm
Cardboard. Approx. 2m high.
Cast aluminium and resin. 1m x 71cm x 79cm
3 ceramic lightbulbs. Largest bulb 1.17m high

WHAT HAPPENS IF?

Amey’s principal strategy is a kind of three dimensional collage – a playful experimental process of moving visual elements in relation to each other, full of strange connections, tensions, hybrids and unholy marriages. The perfect process for a seeker obsessed with choice.  With each positioning, thousands of micro-decisions are made without conscious thought,  new forms, new readings, fluidly emerge – here the critical job of the artist is to be receptive, to be alive to the transforming moment, and to recognise the vision that unknowingly had always been there, somewhere. 

Anxiously fascinated by the excess of possibilities on offer Amey searches in art and in life for an exacerbated beauty of the kind the Surrealists termed Marvellous. It’s not just that pans become clouds, and plates become dimpled lake water, it’s the way that that transformation takes place. We know the nuts and bolts but still can’t get to the bottom of the wonder.

Amey has a witch doctor’s approach to his materials, a shamanistic belief in the power of objects, they come to him pre-loaded with potency.  However this charged engagement with them is not enough, it is about the past, what already is, and is known. The excitement is in what could be, how they can be transformed by his hands, his energies. The plastic watering can’s libido let loose as it grows legs – the lily’s rising sap reversed into a shining, cleansing, aluminium waterfall.

The mannequin bride, barcoded birds and shrink-wrapped dogs seem to be emblems of desire and material possession. To the witch doctor’s power objects we must add Freud’s sexual and Marx’s commodity fetishism to get a better idea of the murky waters Amey is fishing in. 

Fascinated by Folk and Outsider  Art as much as by the work of the Academy, and no slave to the empirical,  Amey is open minded, full of doubt, but convinced of the value of an art that seeks, looking for the threads that connect, but not for answers.

Some artists when they turn things on their head, or open cracks in the everyday certainties, present us with a dystopia, but not Amey. His is a generous, celebratory vision that does not deny the grim realities of life but seeks to offer us a view of a shaken and upended world where the strange and extraordinary possibilities revealed are affirmative and joyous.

Nick Bodimeade