Patricia Fleming Gallery (Glasgow, Scotland) was delighted to participate in NADA Miami. Our booth explored scientific explanations of natural phenomena. Seibæk uses this as a tool to describe turmoil in contemporary life through a more poetic lens. This theme can be used as a force to ask questions, to stretch facts into fiction, and to visualize inner emotions. Seibæk is inspired by Maggie Nelson's autotheorical works, connecting multiple fields of knowledge, never deeming any irrelevant for her explorations.
Walk #1 : Moving between the city and the surfaces we see it through
Amanda Seibæk is walking. From the Highlands to the Lake District, between memories and
landscapes, across the UK and beyond. She walks new routes through Glasgow, where she lives
and works, charting emotional maps of her own as she navigates the city based on friendships
and heartbreaks. Some streets will always feel better than others, at least carry her world
differently. Amanda also walks back and forth between her home and her studio in a city where
the wind is a constant resistance, pushing and pulling you in confusing and annoying ways. The
city and its weather, by the way, make it the perfect place for painting, always providing an
excuse to stay inside. And Seibæk spends her days inside her small studio, walking between her
mind and the landscapes far beyond the view outside the windows. Through different types of
paint, she lets mountains and daydreams blend on semi-transparent voile, moulding them into
maps of their own.
Because Amanda Seibæk paints maps. She paints landscapes as she knows them. Her works
wander outside the structures of streets parks and parking lots. Instead, she paints how she
moves through these spaces, and how she sees a city differently as her life changes.
Because a bridge is no longer just a bridge after a breakup, and if you move slightly to the side of
Seibæk’s paintings in the right light, you will notice how the brushstrokes create a shadow play on
the wall behind, mapping out an elusive, parallel landscape of their own.
When Seibæk moved to Glasgow from Copenhagen four years ago to study Painting and
Printmaking at The Glasgow School of Art, she was already an experienced printmaker. Having
started doing linocut in school at the age of nine, followed by etching and engraving in the years
that followed, she thought she would continue on the same path when moving to a new city.
When Seibæk’s studies were interrupted by a strict lockdown, she found herself stuck inside an
attic studio. This is where painting entered her practice for the first time.
A studio with an impossibly low ceiling meant crawling around on the floor, she could feel her
knees getting sore and her arms getting stronger as she worked. Painting left traces on her body
as well as on the canvas as if her discovery of painting was a kind of physically intimate
experience more than anything. During this period, she worked on long rolls of paper, letting
screen prints and paintings overlap each other into a long continuum. Like a scene from an old
movie, where large maps of the seas are unrolled over big tables, portraying abstracted worlds
detached from the reality out there. Seibæk moved with the work inside her small studio as if it
constituted a world of its own, completely detached from a city silenced by lockdown. In fact, for
a while, the artist only painted in blues. Later, she began to paint on voile, a sheer, shiny material
that lingers in the background of many of her works in her solo exhibition ‘Avenues’ at Patricia
Fleming Gallery (2024). This choice of material was prompted by the wish to capture the air that
surrounds us. Was it the need to paint the unavoidable strong winds that moves us around
Glasgow, forcefully and involuntarily? Or was it maybe the need to give a texture to the more
fundamental forces that direct us through history, like emotions, trade winds or a stranger’s path,
that we come to or follow through new landscapes? When Seibæk returned to her Glasgow
School of Art studio again, having the freedom of painting while standing up, the real world must
have felt more unreal than the bubble she had just left. Crawling and painting – knees sore and
mind opened – her floor paintings already held landscapes of their own.
Amanda Seibæk, Awaiting, 2024. Mixed media on voile
Walk #2: Moving between phone calls, languages and different forms of knowledge
Seibæk is in her studio, talking on the phone. You might even go as far as to say her phone calls
are part of her practice. Her studio is filled to the rim with colour; used paper coffee cups, ready to
be recycled as paint pots, and tubes of paint in every shade. Her friends and family occupy the
space daily, with their voices and opinions, as Seibæk holds a brush in one hand, her phone in
the other. Her mother recognises the sounds of her daughter’s different materials – whether she is
painting with a spray can, or if she has just dropped one of her fragile pastels onto the floor.
Likewise, the artist listens to her mother as she takes off her lab coat at 4 pm, followed by the
sounds of her car as they speak all the way home until her mother is seated by the dinner table.
Otherwise, she listens to her sister as she hangs her laundry up to dry on the other end of the line.
Or her father’s voice, advising on how to deal with an obstacle or decide the next step in life.
You got your father’s career drive, and my poetic relationship to emotions, her mother’s voice
echoes in the back of her head. These are the intimate sounds of a family. They are always there,
among her paintings.
Mothers are useless critics. It is a general rule. They are uselessly nice. Criticism is reserved for
Seibæk’s sister, a constant source of feedback. She tells her when the work isn’t good enough
when she hasn’t pushed herself far enough or recommends reading that can help the paintings
go further.
Stretchers of every size line the walls of Seibæk’s studio, as we discuss her paintings. Her works
are piled up along the walls, hung up wherever there is a free spot, participating in the same
chaos her sister witnesses through the phone camera. She cleans the space as they talk, trying to
make space for another stretcher she can fill with another idea. Piles of books get shuffled away,
mostly poetry, autobiography, notes on walking. Picking up her copy of Maggie Nelson’s ‘Bluets’,
the artist’s life and references smudge together in the space before making their way into her
paintings.
The catalyst for Seibæk’s painting ‘Prelude’ (2023) is the Carte de Tendre – the coded language of
the tender maps, made by 17th bourgeoise women in France. They were maps made to
communicate where and how their love lives played out. Sometimes the landscapes seemed real,
sometimes they resembled the body of a woman. We see faces and feet blending in with their
surrounding landscape of fireworks or spring flowers – yellow sparks of joy open for interpretation.
We can also imagine phone calls with her sister leaving traces in the painted landscape, each in
their own country, mapping out something shared.
In ‘Bluets’, Maggie Nelson takes us through wanderings of everything blue. The feeling, the
metaphor and the pigments: together they make up the auto theory of letting the mind wander
through the openness of a colour. It is the title as much as the colour that holds the book together,
gathering what is accumulated along the way. Open-minded and autotheoretical, treating all forms
of knowledge as equally important. The colour blue is by no means more important than feeling
blue. In Seibæk’s works, author theory creates its paths in paint. We see one landscape turn
into the next in ‘Meetings’ (2023). It holds vivid storylines prompted by the artist’s own
experiences. Her colour-coded references display everything a classical map can’t hold.
Like with Nelson’s ‘Bluets’, Seibæk always starts her new painting with its title. Words like,
‘Cerebrum’, ‘Outlines’ and ‘Tender’ become descriptive of the autobiography told through a
wandering mind, nurturing connections that otherwise wouldn’t be mapped out in her paintings.
Even in her collection of poetry books – different titles scattered across her studio – ideas are
structured through lines of words. In her works, the stretchers provide this structure, and perhaps
this is one of the reasons she makes them visible. Without words, these wanderings turn into
maps, but the maps look more like ideas taking shape through the things she surrounds herself
with.
As generally in Seibæk’s works, the paths may be elusive but the feelings stick. In ‘Burnt’ (2023),
we follow seeds as they travel along with us, growing into plants that leave life-long burning marks
on our skin: A reminder of the place where they touched you for the first time. The seeds belong
to the toxic Giant Hogweed which grows along the lines of rivers and train tracks and travels
under the soles of our shoes, mimicking our movements in the landscape. They also grow in the
garden outside her Glasgow studio, the seeds following her upstairs to make their mark on her
paintings.
In Danish this plant is called bjørneklo, meaning bear claw. When we speak, Seibæk moves
between the English and the Danish term, just like our conversations are an ongoing movement
between each of our Scandinavian languages, and our shared, secondary English. Our native
pronunciations come between us, like a stubborn veil, and bring us back to speaking English. To
move between languages almost feels like looking at Seibæk’s paintings made on voile. The
glitch-like affect her paintings create through the shadowplay on the wall behind feels like an
illustration of our own lingual and cultural in-betweenness. Simultaneously present and hidden –
perhaps most of all existing in the space between, as a kind of double.
Walk #3: Moving between voile, skin and the wind
There is a tenderness to the silky-looking surface of the voile, simultaneously looking like a misty
Glasgow morning and a veil protecting the painting. Through the veil, Seibæk initially wanted to
paint air, and after a couple of years in Glasgow, you have no choice but to find a comforting
excitement every time a strong wind wraps you up and carries you in its direction. ‘Tender’
(2023) is the painting in the show that most distinctively carries the feeling of tenderness, with
human silhouettes more defined than in Seibæk’s other paintings. It is, however, painted on the
more solid and canvas-like surface of the calico. In ‘Tender’ the two bodies are separate, yet curling
up together. Their sore knees are more present than their faces, hidden on an untreated
background. Whereas the self is difficult to navigate, the surrounding paintings, maps, and landscapes
offer a different openness that may tell us that we will find ourselves on the paths we walk and the
landscapes we visit, rather than curling up, trying to find the insider in ourselves.
Field notes from a conversation with Amanda Seibæk and Emma Aars, on the occasion of the
solo exhibition ‘Avenues’ at Patricia Fleming Gallery 2024.
Commissioned by Patricia Fleming Gallery
Written by Emma Aars
Emma Aars (1995) is an artist and writer based between Oslo and Glasgow. She holds a master's
in Art Writing from the Glasgow School of Art, and her writing has been featured in journals such as
Vestoj, Vinduet and A Rabbit’s Foot. She is the co-founder and editor of Forloren Skildpadde
journal for Scandinavian Writing, and her newest book ‘Eye as a Camera’ (2024) is published by
Objektiv Press.