Amy Todman is a writer and artist from Scotland, now based in Lebanon. Using a combination of drawing, painting, animations, objects and words, her work explores the idea of attention and the mutability of lived experience.

Often focused on materiality and language, her practice explores systems and structures, the creation of rules through which an artwork develops over time. By exploring structures of human understanding (languages of word and image, routine and ritual, for example) she highlights the limits of each and the possibilities in their extension beyond common use. This play between imposed external control and trust in a process is significant. 

Her work brings the process of making to the foreground while also respecting the creation of forms, more or less stable, in the world. The process of creating the work is in delicate balance with the product that is created and her work creates a moment of focused attention, providing an aesthetic and intellectual structure for the viewer. If her work was a statement it might say, ‘pay attention, there’s something delicate here for you.’. Her insistent, at times uncomfortable, focus on both process and product prompts reflection on a world in necessary flux.

The work is conversational – speaks rather than tells -and the resulting artworks are more or less ephemeral. The interplay of structure, forms and forms of attention through which each work is produced creates a framework that alludes to stable form even while that form is destabilized by material ephemerality and the complexity of subjective experience. 

All images and text on this website are copyright Amy Todman unless otherwise stated