Amy Todman
Dundee, Scotland *1982
"I see art as a process that happens everyday, a way to relate to a world that is both stable and in flux."
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Amy Todman lives in Armenia where she works as both writer and artist. Using drawing, found objects and words, her work explores the delicate territories of self and other, what's around the edge, and what lies at the heart of the matter. Often focused on materiality and language, her practice explores systems and structures, the creation of rules through which an artwork develops over time. By exploring structures of human understanding she highlights the limits of each and the possibilities in their extension beyond common use. This play between imposed external control and trust in a process is significant. In each work there is an intention to bring process to the foreground. A focus on process as an end in itself prompts reflection on how the work is created; specific structures, forms of ‘attention’ which operate as both subject and object. Here, the process of creating the work becomes the work. Quantitative and qualitative methods create observations of measure and record, routine, rhythm and return. Taken together these tools and processes creates a moment of focused attention, providing both aesthetic and intellectual structure. In this, the interplay of description and observation is central and highlights a way of looking that might otherwise remain concealed, uncovering the significance of these partial objects and texts to the author and opening an otherwise highly subjective dialogue to a wider audience. Outcomes are often expressed as book-works but the relics of the process (drawings, sculptures and poems) are retained as an archive. The work is conversational – speaks rather than tells -and the resulting artworks are more or less ephemeral. The interplay of structure, forms and forms of attention through which each work is produced creates a framework that alludes to stable form even while that form is destabilized by material ephemerality and the complexity of subjective experience.
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