Amna Ilyas

I approach art making not as creating something completely new, but as reorganizing what is already there. I respond to my immediate surroundings, each material has its own formal properties, which are just as important to me in its contemporary, historical, and environmental resonance. In this way, I treat materials like artifacts as things to be learned from. Also for this
reason, my work tends to be tactile and immediate. It is mostly an experience- a wholesome one, tangible and surreal, hence the work reflects absence, its multidimensionality and presence of shadows intimate that there is a desire for that absent presence.

For the idea of absence I have been working with Perspex from the past two years. The concept was to formulate a new artistic language incorporating elementary sources such as light, space, shadows in constructing illusion of forms. My starting point was the excitement about the three-dimensionality of transparency, more precisely the sheet of transparent Perspex as a medium for my artistic statement. My intention is to make it visible in order to provide a new ordering of space through light.

The light has to have an almost dominating quality to enhance the tangible nature of the work to the extent of it becoming solid. In previous works, When the light appears on each piece it creates multiple effects, as nobody know what exactly the actually form is, so there is this constant illusions which makes the forms pulsate and turn into more three dimensional.

In these works I find the clearest communication to be through the direct manipulation of
materials. Hence my Goal as a sculptor is to get as close as possible through materials to various
kinds of sensations. In my sculptures the imperative was to invoke the desire to get a way
through lights. Though the created image is also an illusion, again could not exist without light.

This aspect relates to the subject deals with dreams also about the personal experiences as
Muslim woman. These metaphoric, unconventional and per formative narratives/sketches
in my work employ Islamic/Eastern references and other archetypes to explore power
dynamics, isolation and societal forces. As reflective thinker I not only try to redefine the
critical boundaries of art but expand the viewer’s capacity to contemplate ideas of universal
significance.