Taking the bodily, medical and performative contents that make up my artistic practice, I use my own orchestrated experiences of medical tourism procedures as a public platform to encourage discussion about the cultural, political and social meanings assigned to the female body and its capabilities. The bodily interventions include tubal ligation in Thailand, hymenoplasty in Poland, IVF consultations in Bulgaria and full breast tattoos in Latvia. I believe that upholding the high status of motherhood and treating childfree people as deviations from the standard of motherhood is clearly limiting to childfree women in terms of their acceptance as valuable contributors to the society and as people free of biological determinism. The aim of my artistic research is to contribute to the growing field of investigation in the childfree lifestyle and to question the standard of the normativity of motherhood for women in the Western society and to link the social stigmatization of childfree people with investigations in sociology, performativity, bioethics, body art, feminism and queer theory.
The Next Thing, Bury Art Museum and Sculpture Centre, Moving Image Gallery, Bury, UK
Italian born, Amy moved to London in 1998 and graduated from Central Saint Martins College in 2005. Her work is mainly autobiographical but also holds a socio-political dynamic. Making the personal public her work originates from the female body, concepts of everyday life, loss of identity, the importance of memories and the abstraction of longing are central to her practice. Domesticity as a ‘visual language’ where maternal subjectivity is explored via different media such us drawings, photography, video installation and performance.