"Process is paramount and I think about the notion of play in my work. I began as a painter and still hold dear the idea of touch and what is mutable; I consider this in the materials I bring to my processes. I find photography to be intrinsically transient, and yet it remains static. I love dichotomies. I respond to subjects and materials I work with and think about what it means to alter and change and shift expectations. I add paint and cut away at photos… I propose questions… What happens when you steep images in salt and let them dry? I work with the accidents and experiments to let the unscripted shape meaning with me, both as activator and observer."
Amy Friend
Amy Friend creates multi-layered photographs that transport viewers into an emotional dream world. She devotes herself with great intensity not only to such issues as identity and the past but to the medium of photography as such. In Friend’s latest series, Salt Soaked Sea, water has become a crucial feature of her artistic inquiry. The ocean is incorporated into memories of times past. Her prints, dipped into seawater, show a surprising and particularly weighty materiality: Friend leaves them to dry for several weeks until all of the water has evaporated, leaving behind a surface covered with crystalline traces of salt.