Amberlie Perkin’s art practice involves listening to ghosts. Drawn to the interplay of grief and ecology, her thesis project Honoring Ghosts & The Nature of Grief explores wounded ecologies in relation to both the human body and our non-human kin in this time of environmental degradation and accelerated extinctions. Perkin’s artwork examines how curious and embodied engagement with the natural environment can provide a visual and material language to articulate the complex and often abstract emotions of grieving. Her process enacts the materiality of mourning and metamorphosis, while exploring the regenerative potential of death to animate new growth in the natural world and our lives. Perkin’s installations are an invitation to make metaphoric connections to nature, to feel, to remember, and to commune with ghosts.
This yearlong thesis project culminated in her final exhibition which included:
Listen Now to the Quickening of Ghosts Who Whisper Rebuild, Rebuild
Tracing Your Ghost II
Lichen Collagraph Print Series
Honoring Ghosts & The Nature of Grief
Thesis Installaion. Sculptural works: Listen Now to the Quickening of Ghosts Who Whisper Rebuild, Rebuild, and Tracing Your Ghost II.
Tracing Your Ghost II. 2020. Thesis Installation. Sculptural works created with relief prints of fragmented tree stumps, ponderosa pine bark & lichen on rice paper.
Lichen Collagraph Print Series, 2020. Thesis Installation. Artworks on either end of the triptych are 2 collagraph prints layered together.
Listen Now to The Quickening of Ghosts Who Whisper Rebuild, Rebuild
Listen Now to the Quickening of Ghosts Who Whisper Rebuild, Rebuild. 2020. Thesis Installation. Sculptural works, variable dimensions. Chicken wire, paper mache, acrylic paint, and relief prints of tree stumps, pine bark & lichen on rice paper.
Tracing Your Ghost II
ABOUT AMBERLIE PERKIN
Amberlie Perkin is an interdisciplinary artist and art educator. Her artwork investigates place, history, grief, and wounded ecologies. Perkin’s diverse practice is deeply rooted in the embodied experience of engaging with nature and physically exploring sites which have been altered, often detrimentally, by human industrial interventions. She is drawn to abandoned or wounded landscapes, searching for their histories, remnants, and ghosts. Her practice celebrates kinship while offering a poetic lamentation of our complex relationship with the natural environment.
Amberlie Perkin holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Emily Carr University of Art & Design (2010), a Bachelor of Education from Simon Fraser University (2011), and a Master of Visual Arts Degree from Emily Carr University of Art & Design (2020). She has exhibited both locally and internationally.
IG: @amberlieperkinart
