Undercurrent Amy Boulton

20 February – 19 March 2016
Monday – Saturday, 11am—5pm

Undercurrent is an exhibition of new work developed by Amy Boulton during her residency at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop. Amy has been the recipient of this year’s Edinburgh College of Art/Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop graduate bursary award. The award provides studio space for three months and funding to one graduate of Edinburgh College of Art each year.


Amy primarily works in digital media and has been making new moving image work while on residency. In this work semi-transparent figures inhabit an incomplete urban landscape whose development has been abandoned due to economic decline; walking along paths intended to connect housing developments to the wider city but now left incomplete, leading to nowhere.

These spectral figures are the impoverished cousins of render ghosts, the idealised inhabitants of architects drawings and proposals. The characters in The Waterfront enact this unrealised vision of aspirational seafront living; entering buildings that never came to be and withdrawing their money from non-existing cash machines, all the while going unnoticed by the locals they cross paths with.

During her residency Amy has also produced a series of wax casts of mass produced crockery and storage containers of a type that are ubiquitous in the catering industry. The imperfect nature of these casts is in stark contrast to the slickly machined originals. These objects, normally used to supply, serve, transport and store goods, are now stripped of their standardised regularity and their functionality. Together the casts form the installation Back Store, a glimpse behind the scenes of hospitality, an industry synonymous with generosity, conviviality and welcome.

Image credits: Lesley Jones


Biography

Amy Boulton is an artist based in Edinburgh. She graduated from Intermedia at Edinburgh College of Art in 2015. Recent exhibitions include: ALT., Bargain Spot, Edinburgh, 2015 and Shift and Spin, Stanley Mills, Perthshire, 2015.

She organised Thought Leadership, a collaborative event comprising of talks, screenings and live performanceEdinburgh College of Art, Embassy Annuale, Edinburgh, 2015.

Artist website


Each year Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, in collaboration with Edinburgh College of Art, offers a bursary to one student graduating from ECA’s School of Art BA, MA or MFA courses. The bursary offers graduates studio space for three consecutive months at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop and a budget for materials.

The aim of the bursary is to help emerging newly-graduated artists to establish themselves after leaving college and support the development of their practice and networks.