Born and raised in North Vancouver, British Columbia, Amy Duval received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Kwantlen Polytechnic University in 2017 where she focused on ceramic sculpture and installation based work. Merging slip casted, hand built, and wheel thrown forms, Amy creates site specific installations that explore her interests in the mechanic, organic, internal and external, as well as drawing and painting. These installations are simultaneously perverse and familiar, futile and strange, and explore ideas of growth and transformation in relation to machinery and the human body. She sees working directly on the wall as a method of bridging the gap and exploring the tension between sculpture and painting, and hopes that through creating site specific works she will deepen her understanding of how she interacts with the world, and the role she plays in contemporary society as a maker. In April 2017, she was accepted as a ceramic artist in residence at Harbourfront Centre, Toronto, and in August 2019 she started as the full time Ceramic Studio Technician at the Shaw Centre at Medalta, Medicine Hat.

https://www.amyduvalvisualartist.com

ARTIST STATEMENT

My wall based installations are made both in direct and indirect reference to the ever-changing urban/industrial landscape of contemporary society. Mechanical and industrial detritus fills the surrounding landscape with objects, forming sporadic compositions that become increasingly ubiquitous, familiar yet foreign, taking up continuously expanding amounts of physical and psychological space. The drawings explore the surface tension between the two and three dimensional, one is meant to imitate depth and volume; the other exists in physical space, creating a visual bridge between mediums. Working with the idea of the diagram as a mode for understanding the world, objects are placed in specific proximity to one another to create new relationships. These diagrams are a collection of paradoxes, chaotic and organized, and acts as a metaphor for the simultaneously beautiful and messy nature of the human experience.