Amanda Michele Brown

 

My art is an experiment in duality. I balance chaos with order to visually mirror the dichotomy of feelings tied to experiences. Each piece is an echo of the mixed emotions felt in everyday moments. While the moments represented are fleeting, my artwork is a meditation on time. This allows me to break down the memory into both structure and flow, creating a physical representation of the intangible.

 

For my 30 x 30 x 30 project, I used this approach to journal the month of January. As a new mom, I've watched the awe-inspiring growth of my daughter. Any parent will tell you a single month can bring significant changes for a child under one. The experience is daunting, joyous, and raw, with as many ups and downs as there is monotony. I documented these changes, the emotional undertones, and my postpartum experience daily and incorporated the written word for the first time in my work.

 

Together, these elements serve as a looking glass into a month of both explosive changes and dire monotony: where each day, one after the other, feels mind-numbingly repetitive but seen as a whole is the month my daughter started daycare, said "Mama" for the first time, began to crawl and continued her progress from baby to toddler. It's the opposite of the work on view; I painstakingly pulled the uniqueness out of each day in a way that together still feels cohesive. But she wasn't the only one who experienced changes, the mental and physical toll. This project became a practice in endurance and raw honesty: a timelapse of a life in progress.