Amanda Houchen has a Masters in Fine Art from City and Guilds School for Art and has recently completed the onsite course at Turps and Banana. 

Amanda has exhibited at The Affordable Art Fair and The London Art Fair, as well as group exhibitions including The Ingram Collection Young Contemporary Talent Purchase Prize and Exceptional, Collyer Bristow. 

She has been shortlisted for Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Threadneedle and John Moores.

Amanda's work looks at the relationship between illusionism and abstraction - she plays with the spatial properties of the painting through formal decisions of division, colour and light. She is interested in achieving optical illusion through the placement of flat geometric architectural shapes, fused with more organic forms. Her paintings tap into a sense of otherness; worlds within worlds, mirroring and yet upsetting what is outside. She is keen to create spaces that cannot easily be put into context, exploring settings that convey a sense of artifice; mysterious, disorientating, and kaleidoscopic.

Through a use of vivid colour, rhythm and depth, Amanda confronts the viewer with an ambiguous sense of place. This questioning of pictorial structure, serves to break open and question structures that exist in a wider sense; political, social and artistic. Amanda uses a specific kind of layering, inviting the viewer to look through each layer to the next, almost as a series of screens. She is interested in exploring the possibilities and limitations of paint - how applying it in particular ways can create a sense of dislocation, calling into question certain fundamental concepts such as space, time and identity. 

Amanda is inspired by images of organic forms and structures, underwater plants, internal cell like structures, costume, fabrics, decorative patterns, the tropical and exotic.