Biography
Amy Leigh (she/her) is a queer, chronically ill settler of Scottish and Irish descent who currently, and graciously resides in amiskwaciywâskahikan via tkaronto. She is a maker, agitator, and cultural worker whose creative praxis centers on community + capacity building through printmaking, zine culture, and textile-based epistolary research-creation. Since 2017, Amy has 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 work explores creation-as-research methodologies using printmaking, paper making, and textiles; with a focus on materiality and process to speak to embodied experiences of grief + loss through the woven form.
Much of my artwork builds on past projects that delve into inquiry around themes of memory, trauma, grief, nostalgia and by using acts of slowness, attunement to place, and collecting preserving as processing and/or coping mechanisms.
I work with materials that hold agency, making them collaborators in the process. Acquired through the thoughtful means of gift, forage, growth or upcycle; this method of making embraces an economy of means as an inherent response to an existence of inequitable socio-economic class structures.
My work exists in the forms of books and zines, 2D prints, installation, and sculptural-esq objects that sit somewhere inbetween.