Amy McRae - Photographer and Mixed Media Artist

My work begins with noticing. I am drawn to moments when light, color, texture or atmosphere causes something ordinary to suddenly stand apart from its surroundings. I rarely go out looking for a particular image. Instead, I wander and respond to what is already there—to the moment that makes me stop and look again.

Photography becomes both a way of recording these encounters and material for further exploration. I manipulate, isolate and reassemble images, moving between intuitive response and a more analytical process of piecing things together. I am interested in this tension between what is found and what is constructed, and in the way an image can shift as I work with it.

There is a storyteller in this process, but I am less interested in providing a fixed narrative than in creating space for uncertainty and discovery. I want the viewer to encounter the work first through feeling—to stop, question what they are seeing, and allow their own associations to emerge before settling on an interpretation.

Whether working through photography or sculpture, I am interested in transformation: how something observed can become something imagined, and how the act of making can reveal a direction I could not have anticipated at the beginning.