To gaze. To look steadily and intently, with great curiosity, interest, pleasure, or wonder is the starting point for Amber Mottram’s practice. Through film, sculpture and installation two intertwining strands emerge: the gaze of her house as a non animate object and the gaze of the artist onto the non animate objects contained within.

 

Incorporating and expanding on paraphenalia from her domestic sphere, her sculptures reveal themselves through an instinctual and playful making process. Childrens toys, clothes pegs, tea towels, elastic bands, clothes airers and envelope patterns are reassembled, broken, turned upside down thus inviting chance and the properties inherent to the materials to have their own agency. Inversion and negative space are frequently engaged as a method to abstract and free the objects aesthetically from their original function.

 

Interrogating the potency of creation that happens in the mind through periods of confinement Mottram draws on the perspective of her house, the narratives hidden within and the dichotomy of apathy and creativity that has been her experience of motherhood. Daylight is a central character in her films. Relentlessly in motion, beyond and despite the domestic dramas within. It conveys the notion of time passing and the duality of existing in the mundane and the ability to transcend it through art.