Amber is a video-maker and poet who explores the experiences of femininity and nostalgia through immersive, uneasy spaces. Focusing on communicating the emotive and ethereal qualities of her poems and videos, she allows the audience to feel the artwork and become immersed within it. The recent rediscovery of a poem that she wrote in her early teenage years has inspired her current work, where she has gone on a journey to find the most honest, emotive way to present the sinister feelings within it. The artworks act as an homage to her younger self, providing exposure and validation to the experiences she had.

Two pieces in particular have influenced the way she has gone on to present the poem: The Warmth of my Tub and The Warmth of my Tub Stop Motion. The former is an audio piece, with emotive music and a spoken-word performance of the original poem. The latter is an audio-visual piece, with audio of water filling up a bathtub and being splashed about before draining. The visual presents a stop motion of the poem in cut-out text moving in and out of the frame, over Sinking, a digital painting of her face half-submerged in water.

Following on from these works, she edited the poem to become more free-flowing, to mirror the water it addresses and to allow for looping. Overall, these stages allowed for the discovery of her preference for audio-visual methods, as they produced a deep feeling of nostalgia and intimacy.

Amber displays The Warmth of my Tub as an installation piece in the Sitting With It degree show, in her final iteration of the poem. A video of red water swishing about is projected in a dark space, along with audio on speakers of her performing a reading of the poem in the bath, with sound effects of the water swishing and bubbling. It creates an emotive, sinister space, communicating themes of pain, natural processes, relationships and mental instabilities. It speaks to both her elusive younger self and the audience, who can sit with the work as it looks back to the specific time the poem was written, immersing them into the scenario she was situated in, and potentially relate to it themselves.

Instagram: @a___williams

Email: amberleannewilliams@gmail.com

Images

Digital image of performance, reading ‘The Warmth of my Tub’, 2022

Sinking, 2022. Digital painting

Flows Over the Top of My Mind, 2022. Clay and fabric, 5 x 17cm