Amanda Nedham

Exhibitions:

Over & Under

Amanda Nedham is a Canadian artist, educator, curator, and current PhD candidate in the Department of Religion at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Her work explores intersections between drawing, mysticism, and ethics, conceiving drawing as a catalyst, collaborator, and conjurer that engages the unseeable through the embodied line. Nedham received a BFA in Printmaking from OCAD University, where she was the medal recipient, and an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she received a Presidential Scholarship. Her work has been exhibited across North America and in Europe. She has published one book, My Boyfriend is a Peacekeeper, tracing the history of Canadian Peacekeeping through imagined love letters and drawing.

The Werewolf of Composition, 2020-2023

Mixed Media on Board, (12 pieces, each 8x10”)

These works were inspired by the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, specifically Dag Hammarskjöld’s poetic reflections published posthumously in his collection Markings. The book is a spiritual, almost mystical, self-portrait of a leader grappling with an intensely moral view of service, exploring duty, solitude, and discipline. These panels are a memorial offering inspired by one of his poems, ‘Autumn in Lapland’: The warm rain-laden East wind rushes down the dried-up river bed. In its banks, yellowing birches tremble in the storm. /The opening bars in the great hymn of extinction. Not a hymn to extinction or because of it. Not a hymn in spite of extinction. But a dying which is the hymn.

Exhibitions