Within her practice, Amber Franks investigates personal trauma and loss concerning baneful femininity.
Her work poses challenging questions that consider the spectators’ space and progression within her exhibits. Devising a narrative that invokes the viewer to reflect upon the self exemplifies how inherently, various traumas still coincide with one another even when divided into separate narratives.
Her work flits between genres within a wide range of mediums, never defining her practice in a single definitive form. Her multi-disciplinary practice utilises Photography, Videography, Installation and Printmaking to explore liminal areas, using found objects to complicate the other mediums shown alongside them contextually. Through various perceptions, Franks pushes her work to challenge and complicate one another. Her varied approach to the preconception of trauma exemplifies how it manifests and establishes itself within the mind.
Amber explores grief, considering reactions such as anger, detachment and anxiety. Focusing on her life experiences as well as collective concerns, Franks deconstructs female learnt and inherited behaviours. Her abrasive and subtly political subject matter raises consciousness on normalised and “casual” sexism. Rather than being “over-determined” Franks uses playful exploration to explore conscious and unconscious bias issues that were historically “swept under the carpet”.
Education
2012-2013 Foundation Diploma, Fine Art, University of The Creative Arts, Epsom
2013-2016 BA HONS Fashion Promotion & Imagery, University of The Creative Arts, Epsom
2019-2021 MA Fine Art, University of Brighton
Exhibitions
07.01.2020, Fragmented, University ofBrighton
24.03.2020, 128 Elsewhere,@128elsewhere, Instagram
26.05.2020, Lost in Isolation, Online,Void Collective
27.10.2020, The New Black, Online, VoidCollective
02.06.2020, Picturing Lockdown, OnlineArchive, Historic England
30.07.2020, Portraits of Self-Isolation,Vermont USA, PhotoPlace Gallery
31.07.2020, Isolation with Dementia, Online,Scopio Network
Selected Lectures/Interviews
Introduction to The Publication, University of Brighton
Picturing Lockdown, BBC News
Historic England, BBC Radio Sussex