With Color and Form, Amanda Lilleston Creates an Underwater Sanctuary
A lifelong swimmer sidelined by the pandemic, the Colby artist finds solace in her studio
Amanda J. Lilleston has spent much of her life in the water. A Colby visiting assistant professor of art since 2017, Lilleston began swimming at age 4 or 5, and swam competitively through high school and at Colorado College, where she majored in biology.
After college, she took on the challenge of open-water swimming. She swam in the Atlantic when she worked in the Bahamas, and she swam in Lake Michigan when she moved to Ann Arbor to pursue her M.F.A. at the University of Michigan.
Left: waterform 3, layered woodcuts on sekishu and gampi, 44″ x 33″, 2019. Right: waterform 4 (detail 1), layered woodcuts on sekishu, 44″ x 33″, 2019.
Top: waterform 3, layered woodcuts on sekishu and gampi, 44″ x 33″, 2019. Bottom: waterform 4 (detail 1), layered woodcuts on sekishu, 44″ x 33″, 2019.
“I have spent so much time with my head submerged under water,” she said. “It felt like a sanctuary when I was young. I appreciated that silence. It became something I did for myself.”
Lilleston still swims, but the pandemic has made it nearly impossible for her to swim at an indoor pool. “I am high-risk immunocompromised, and it is very challenging for me to take a mask off my face when I am indoors. I was able to swim at certain points over the summer, but I have fallen out of the routine. It’s very challenging.”
waterform 1, layered woodcuts on sekishu, 33″ x 44″, 2019. (Detail)
“I truly believe in a liberal arts education. I firmly believe my creativity and my ability to succeed as an artist is rooted in a very robust curiosity across disciplines. A liberal arts education is the best thing for students and for inspiring creativity and getting people to be more open in general.”—Amanda Lilleston
Instead, she is making artwork that suggests beings or things floating in the water and drifting through the current. She calls her latest body of work Waterforms, and it represents the sanctuary that is missing in her life during the ongoing pandemic.
“This is me carving my memories into a board and printing them over and over again,” she said.
These are woodblock prints on handmade Sekishu paper. At first glance, they do not look like woodcut prints. They look like light-colored patterns and biological organic forms floating in and on top of the water. Each print represents a specific location where Lilleston has swum or trained.
Left: develop, adapt, break free series: late stage (detail), woodblock print collage, 40″ x 36″, 2013. Right: oogenesis (detail), our etchings and a woodblock print overlay on gampi, 36″ x 44″, 2013.
Top: develop, adapt, break free series: late stage (detail), woodblock print collage, 40″ x 36″, 2013. Bottom: oogenesis (detail), our etchings and a woodblock print overlay on gampi, 36″ x 44″, 2013.
Left: untitled, layered woodcuts on sekishu, 2019. Right: untitled, layered woodcuts on sekishu, 2018.
Top: untitled, layered woodcuts on sekishu, 2019. Bottom: untitled, layered woodcuts on sekishu, 2018.
Two digital prints from Somatic landscapes.
Some of the woodblocks she carved new for this project, others are left over from other bodies of work. She likes to reiterate her work and find new uses for old forms.
Beyond Waterforms, her art mixes ecology and biology, with zoological, botanical, and anatomical references. She transforms imagery of the body and scientific ideas using her skills with drawing, carving and printing.
All of those tangible experiences transfer into her art-making practice. She’s good with her hands, whether drawing with a pen or pencil, carving a block of wood, or creating large-scale prints on delicate paper, as with the prints in Waterforms.
As an artist, she embraces her abiding interest in biology specifically and the sciences in general. “Intellectually, biology was extremely rewarding for me. I ended up thriving in those biology classes because I am a visual learner. I was able to reprocess a lot of biological ideas visually. I was able to understand how things work by drawing them out, by really being present and physical in advanced ecology, out in the woods, touching things.”
Installation of Waterbodies woodcuts in Colby College Museum of Art. Photo by Daniel Zhang
Most prints are 33-by-44 inches, and when Lilleston showed them last year at the Colby College Museum of Art in a faculty exhibition, she did not hang them on the wall, but she allowed them to hang in space as an installation, with light and shadows interacting with the color and translucent quality of the paper to create an immersive experience – almost as if being in water.
Given Lilleston’s interest in art and her background in science, Colby is a perfect place, where she teaches all levels of print and digital media.
“I truly believe in a liberal arts education. I firmly believe my creativity and my ability to succeed as an artist is rooted in a very robust curiosity across disciplines,” she said. “A liberal arts education is the best thing for students and for inspiring creativity and getting people to be more open in general.”
More of Amanda Lilleston’s work on amandalilleston.com and Instagram.
