AMBER HEARN
Amber Hearn is currently based on Dharug and Gundungurra Land, Blue Mountains, Australia. Growing up in regional New South Wales and Papua New Guinea, Amber’s childhood was immersed in nature which has shaped her relationship with the self, land, and place. Ambers’ practice mainly engages the field of painting, yet traverses installation, performance video and virtual reality.
Exploring notions of the feminine, birth, and motherhood, along with her personal history and childhood experiences, Amber’s work explores individual yet universal experiences. Utilising the landscape both as a presentation of current place and memory, it is also a safety lens for her to investigate often painful yet beautiful narratives. Amber draws on her long-standing relationship with the bush and the natural world she has inhabited throughout her life. Being deeply interested in ancient history, ritual and particularly women, she also explores these themes through colour, form, repetition, and primal gesture.
“Most recently through an exploration of the body, giving birth and motherhood, I found myself directly translating my visceral internal sphere through the landscape I am currently inhabiting in the mountains. Entering a very primal immediate space, rainy mountains become gushing milk, river gorges become water breaking, multiple breast mountains and openings appear. I’m capturing this immediacy, void of cognitive thought process in my relationship with how I paint, visceral and assertive, an extension of self. An enquiry into ‘being in the world’… a removal of the cognitive self/observer takes place.”