amanda walters

Portals

For almost 30 years, my uncle lived off and on again in a crooked little house that was slowly sinking into the clay earth it was built on. I was always fascinated by his relationship to the home—its quirks and magnetism. I wanted to make art about his house, or even for his house, but he hated that. I imagined making a giant blanket to drape over the house and tuck it into. Two years ago, he died in the house. After his death, I inherited a garbage bag full of band t-shirts that he had collected for 40 or so years. The bag was moved from one out-of-the-way location to another until I decided to use its contents to make the quilt that I fantasized about making during his life. Making the quilt was a meditation on him, his death, and the multiple facets of death—transformation, loss, memory, voids, portals, and magic. You are here, and then you are not.

2025. Care at SPAACES, Sarasota, Florida.

Know Florida

Published by Play Press Zine
Available for purchase on the Play Press Zine website

Know Florida deconstructs an image from a 1920s agricultural brochure, to better understand the motivations behind the design of the South Florida landscape, a process that is not unique and can be seen in most corners or North America and Europe.

Swamp Rainbow 

A series of textile paintings quoting newspaper articles from 1970-2007, each depicting strained, confusing, and often uncanny examples of humankind’s relationship with nature. Coded within those eamples are insights to the ways that we, collectively, have processed the signs of climate change, often through humor and dissociation. 

2020. NIAD Art Center, Richmand, California.

Peafowl Fantasy: an Archive of an Imagined Florida

A series of absurd studies from research on human engagement with flora and fuana in Florida, Florida’s relationship with other states, a proposal for a science experiment, and highlights of the odd nature of bird owners. 

2016. Perry Family Art Center, San Francisco.