Amber Hearn

Amber Hearn is a visual artist working on Dharug and Gundungurra Land, Blue Mountains, Australia. Hearn grew up in Tamworth in regional New South Wales and Papua New Guinea, where she was immersed in nature and developed a strong connection to land, and place. Her primary practice is painting but she has also worked in installation, performance, video, and virtual reality.

Exploring notions of the feminine, birth, and motherhood, along with her personal history and childhood experiences, Amber’s work explores individual yet universal experiences. Utilising the landscape both as a presentation of current place and memory, it is also a safety lens for her to investigate often painful yet beautiful narratives. Amber draws on her long-standing relationship with the bush and the natural world she has inhabited throughout her life. Being deeply interested in ancient history, ritual and particularly women, she also explores these themes through colour, form, repetition, and primal gesture.

“Most recently through an exploration of the body, giving birth and motherhood, I found myself directly translating my visceral internal sphere through the landscape I am currently inhabiting in the mountains. Entering into a very primal immediate space, rainy mountains become gushing milk, river gauges become water breaking, multiple breast mountains and openings appear. I’m capturing this immediacy, void of cognitive thought process in my relationship with how I paint, visceral and assertive, an extension of self. An enquiry into ‘being in the world’… a removal of the cognitive self/observer takes place.”

Amber graduated from The National Art School with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) in 2014. Hearn has been exhibiting since 2012 and represented by Curatorial+Co since 2019. She has been a finalist in several major prizes including Paddington Art Prize, Glover Art Prize, Fishers Ghost Art Award, and Blacktown City Art Prize. Amber has exhibited in both solo and group shows across Australia including Caboolture Regional Art Gallery. Hearn’s work has been featured in Artist Profile, Art Almanac, Art Edit, Inside Out and Real Living.