Biography
amy leigh (she/her) is a queer, disabled, settler of Scottish and Irish descent who graciously resides in amiskwaciywâskahikan via tkaronto. She is a maker, agitator, and arts administrator whose creative praxis centers on community + capacity building through printmaking, papermaking, and textile-based epistolary research-creation. From 2017 to 2020, Amy curated The Zine Machine Project — a roaming gold vending machine that distributes small zines. Amy holds a Diploma in Arts & Cultural Management from MacEwan University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Printmaking from the University of Alberta.
Artist Statement
Situated within a feminist, anti-capitalist framework, my practice centers on materiality and process, often utilizing creation-as-research methodologies, rooted in both Fine Art and Craft techniques such as papermaking, printmaking, and textiles. The materials I use, acquired through the thoughtful means of gift, forage, growth, or upcycling, hold agency, making them collaborators in the process. This method of making embraces an economy of means as an inherent response to an existence of inequitable socio-economic class structures.
Much of my work is inquiry-driven and often focuses on themes of memory and nostalgia through an embodied lens of disability. By embracing acts of slowness, attunement to place, and collecting/preserving as coping mechanisms, I seek to unpack the things we wish we could say aloud, the letters we’ve yet to write, and the not-quite-tangible, murky third space of one’s memory that exists somewhere between dream state and reality.
My artwork exists in various forms: books and zines, 2D prints, installation, and sculptural-esque objects that fall somewhere in the in-between.