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This page describes my main solo and group shows since 2000. You can
see the work in the online gallery.
2003 “Drawing Breath“
Welfare State International, Cumbria | Gallery
Artist's Statement
"Planning doesn’t work for me. Sketching is like learning
a language. If you look at a chin that is a particular shape, you
add that to your repertoire of what chins can be.
Sketching isn’t drawing. Sketching is a process of coming to understand
the object to be drawn. Drawing is creating an image that has meaning.
I sketch from life, and draw from memory – from within.
When I start to draw, I know the scale at which I shall work,
but not much else. I sit before the paper, staring, until I can see
a shape in my head. It won’t be a version of the image I want to create. It’s
more a premonition of the important forms I want to communicate.
When I started Sounding the Bridge, which shows a judge in his robes,
the shape in my head was of interlocking arches, moving forward and back,
at a diagonal to the page.
I use a pencil taped to the end of a broom handle for large pictures.
The distant swoop of pencil on paper feels like a dance striking
up. These first marks are thrilling. They start me on a journey,
a relationship with an image that can last for days.
Drawing can be like jazz improvisation, riffing off what has gone
before. It’s fascinating to meet the characters that emerge.
A title can come before the image does. Knitters started as part of
a phrase in my head, became a light-hearted picture, and ended as you
see it, darker and more complex."
Gallery Statement
"Amanda has been our artist in residence since September 2002 (on
an Arts Council North Encore scheme). As a passionate teacher she has
inspired many local people to draw on their imaginations. Working in
a long historical tradition of fine hand drawing Amanda is very skilled
and her poetic line can be both lyrical and fierce.
Journeys into one's own inner hopes and anxieties are not easy. Unexpected
discoveries and wayward memories can trigger whirlwinds of emotion. Amanda
has had the courage to lasso her raw and sometimes fragile vision into
artworks of considerable beauty. We are privileged to enjoy the fruits
of her labour."
John Fox Artistic Director Welfare State international
2001-2 “Ancestral Picnic”
The Vortex Gallery, London, The
Barn Gallery, Surrey and Welfare State International, Cumbria | Gallery
With music especially composed and sung by Carol Grimes with Mark Hewins.
Review from Printmaking Today Vol 11 No 4
"Ancestral picnics and other tall tales
Amanda Lebus is a multi-faceted printmaker whose work hovers delicately
between print, sculpture, puppetry and theatre, writes Jim
Anderson RE. Using storytelling and atmospherics, her exhibitions have the
atmosphere of rituals.
As a student in Edinburgh in the late 80's, Lebus produced some of the
most physical printed matter I have ever seen. With mud featuring amongst
the ingredients, she made some of the grungiest aquatints south of Emil
Nolde. These creations grubbed around in some very earthbound zones indeed,
so it is intriguing that her current work makes a virtue of its lightness
and near-invisibility.
An Amanda Lebus exhibition now consists of a space hung with diaphanous
banners of silk, printed in translucent greys and greens with curious
shamanistic images. The effect is like being caught in a mist inhabited
by vaguely recognisable ghosts from our collective unconscious. From
a certain angle, everything is invisible, but move a step to one side
and the light picks out baleful owls, prancing neanderthals and strange
half-human half-animal beasts.
Part of the joy of Lebus's work lies in the fact that these ethereal
images are basic woodcuts, gouged out of cheap-and-cheerful plywood.
(In the past she has exhibited the blocks as well, as if to remind us
of their essential simplicity.) The erriness of the display is all in
the presentation.
It makes perfect sense that this artist should now be working with Welfare
State International. Welfare State is a loose collective of artists and
performers who have devoted themselves to investigating alternatives
to our threadbare, modern rituals. Lebus's work - witty, ethereal and
earthy - suggests ways of re-animating our relationships with the natural
world and our own natures."
2001 “Wind
Songs”
The Fire Exit Gallery, London | Gallery
gallery statement
Amanda Lebus uses painting, woodcuts and linocuts in several series
of images about wind and change.
Some pages are layered, spliced, furled
and pleated. Others lie flat and still.
Some images are quickly made,
gouged from the printing block. Others, delicately incised,
reveal the deliberation of the well made object.
All suggest stories: a boy's
foot becomes a wing, a man's spine turns into a tree.
Ahab, Icarus,
Baba Yaga . . . ghosts of adventurers whisper through
the pictures.
I have shown my own work and collaborated with other artists for group
shows in many parts of the U.K. and in Europe. Examples include:
2005 Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey | Gallery
A group exhibition on the theme of "Light
goes with Darkness as the Sequence does of Steps in Walking".
2002-3 A Child's Eye View | Gallery
A collaborative winter installation by Welfare
State International's ensemble of artists with Cleveland Theatre Company.
More
information on Child's Eye View.
2002 “Fleet of Ideas” | Gallery
101 paper boats on
a river of salt and sand from "A Sense of Occasion", a MAC
Craftspace Touring exhibition at Welfare State International, Cumbria.
Also exhibited at Hereford Cathedral as part of the Good Grief conference
on bereavement, and as part
of 'Marking the Moment" advanced training courses for celebrants
at Welfare State International.
An installation by a group of artists from Welfare State International
at Higherford Mill, Lancashire. This event marked the first phase of
the project to restore the mill as a cultural and educational centre.
Amanda’s work is in numerous private collections in the U.K. and
U.S., and in the public collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum
and Tate Britain. | Commissions
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