Making Space: 1973
Maria Amidu
Air documents the critical moments after a tragic family death in East London in the early 1970s. It comprises three sections and 1973 has been created out of Part One (condition fragments traces).
The installation puts projected photographic images of objects and places from the 1970s to the present day, alongside recordings of texts from the book. These spoken passages have been made by readers who have been invited by the artist because of their personal or professional relationship to the writing.
By drawing on her personal archive and current research concerning this family event, Maria is substantiating a deeply emotional aspect of her own family history for the first time. As well as exploring the writer as artist/artist as writer dynamic, she is interested in how the feelings she has experienced can somehow become part of a wider, and perhaps helpful, conversation about death.
About The Artist
Maria Amidu’s artistic concerns are influenced by the complexities of the relational – between people, and between people and place. Through writing, printmaking, artist’s books, audio visual works and sometimes glassmaking she tries to substantiate what might be going on in collective situations, paying specific attention to what is hidden, obscured or unspoken.
She has developed projects with museums, galleries and other cultural organisations including: Watermarks (2021), Metal Culture; “Where are we?” (2020) Mid-Sussex, District Council; edge/threshold/brink (2018), Nuit Blanche Toronto; Act, Campaign, Petition, Reform, Lobby, Argue and Soit droit fait come est desire (Let it be done as it is desired) (2015);Houses of Parliament; Workforce(a work in progress) (2014), National Maritime Museum; a moment of your time (2013), People United in association with Turner Contemporary; Betty, Pat, Diane, Ivy, Lynette, Bonney (2011), Parramatta Artists’ Studios; Dolphin Loves Disco (and other favourite words) (2012), PEER; 21st Century Reporter (2005), Foundling Museum; Tribute (2002), Arnolfini and Bristol Royal Children’s Hospital; Finders, Keepers (2001), Horniman Museum & Gardens; and ...a moment caught in three dimension(s)(1999), 198 Contemporary Arts & Learning. Her work is in several public and private collections including the Parliamentary Archives (UK), V&A, Arnolfini Collection Trust, and Limerick National Drawing Collection.
She studied glass and ceramics at the University for the Creative Arts and the Royal College of Art. She is currently pursuing a PhD in the School of Arts & Humanities at the Royal College of Art and the title of her research is Making that remembers: a correspondence between emotion and material.
