AMANDA BENNETTS

Amanda Bennetts is a Sunshine Coast based artist working across installation, moving image and photo media. Living with a progressive neurological disease, Bennetts draws on her experience to critically explore issues relating to sickness, cripness and disability. Examining what it means to be an ill-body in the world, Bennetts navigates a realm of living that is political charged and socially determined. Bennetts creates large installations that engage materiality, incorporating video, sound and mass-produced objects, often with clinical and disability aesthetics. When arranged in a space, these aesthetics serve to heighten the precarity of tension and balance between elements of the work.

 

Bennetts recently completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (majoring in Photo Art) from the Queensland College of Art, where she was awarded the 2022 Industry Award for Best In Show: Visual Arts, Photography and CAIA judged by Ellie Buttrose, Curator of Contemporary Australian Art, QAGOMA and the 2022 Outstanding Achievement in a Major—Photographic Art Practice. Following Grad Show, Bennetts was awarded a research bursary through Griffith's prestigious Honours College. Bennetts is a co-director of IN | artist-run initiative at the Old Lockup in Maroochydore and the founder and co-curator of the 40 Under 40 Exhibition and Art Prize (2020-22). In 2021, her work was curated in the annual Undergrowth exhibition among QCA students' most innovative and conceptually coherent work. Bennetts' high aptitude for art was earlier recognised through the award of the QCA Art in Bark Bursary (2019).