About
Born 1984, Amelia Whitelaw graduated in 2008 from Chelsea College of Art and Design.
Whitelaw’s work functions as an ecology of memory. It addresses and articulates experiences of remembrance. The meaning lies within the substances and processes of the installation’s making; ideas become material and materials take on a life of their own.
Journeying in time and space, flesh-like dough moves through Whitelaw’s installation and leaves physical residue that acts like a memory of its own passage. It brings to mind the idea that biographical and autobiographical memories are as essential to human existence as nourishment from food, and that forgetting is as essential as remembering.
Dough serves as one of the most universal symbols for life and the things that sustain it. As bread, dough is one of the most humble and everyday of materials, yet it is charged with historical and psychological meanings accumulated since Neolithic times. Its association with death, as seen in ancient Egyptian and contemporary Mexican funerary rites, is also key to Whitelaw’s work.
By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Genesis 3:17-19 - — >>