2009
On*to*gen-e-sis*

is inspired by the unfolding of organic architecture. In this exhibit, Amanda Small creates a visual language to portray inter-cellular structures. The clay forms occur in multiples, intended to symbolize vast micro-macro landscapes. The human relationship with nature is vastly explored and exploited through technology that allows us to have intimate views of otherwise invisible worlds. Small signifies her ideas pertaining to a living web through metaphor, using sacred geometry, radials, and lattice patterns to speak to intrinsic patterning found within living structures.
Complex patterns of unfolding symmetry depict continuity in the organization of the elaborate cellular structures within each living organism. Correlations between patterns in nature, nature in art, and art in technology and the evolution of this interface reveals detailed patterns and resulted in a desire to establish connectivity between science and nature, and nature and art, and has become the seminal focus of Small's current body of work.
Clay is the catalyst for Small to create representational expressions of the sublime in nature; vastness in the minute, the infinite in a detail. Small's current work exists in fragile equipoise. Balanced between internal and external, it is her way of creating a world within a world, visually revealing the cosmos that surrounds us.
"We dream of traveling through the world. But isn't the world within us? We little know the depths of our own minds. The mysterious road goes inwards" –Novalis, "The Sticky Sublime".......