Amy Winstanley
January 21, 2026
Volume 2
Issue 15
Gideon’s Bakery: What do you like about painting?
Amy Winstanley: I like paintings pliancy; the flexibility of the material itself, being able to intuitively move it around but also how it creates a space for a pliancy of the mind, so to speak – a space in which I am opened up for expansive thought processes. In the physical act of painting I am tuning into the hand, the heart and the head simultaneously. I like paintings endless possibilities, the potential for the painting to change at any moment. I like how any mark, visible or not, is a part of the paintings history, and contains the vibrancy of the hand that made it.
GB: There’s a lightness to your touch even when the surface feels worked and dense. How do you calibrate pressure, illumination, and color to arrive at that balance?
AW: I think keeping things free and flowing by working on a number of canvases concurrently helps, and also breaking up the painting process by physically moving the work around the studio a lot, placing things on the floor, the wall, the desk, upside down etc. Also making sure I don't get stale in my painting by including listening, reading and writing into my studio day. All of which enriches the work itself. I think arriving at the balance you mention is also down to me mostly taking an intuitive approach to mark making and colour choosing, but peppered with more conscious decision making throughout the journey of a painting. So really there's a felt sense of balance (even if that's an awkward feeling of balance) that I'm consciously, and subconsciously, aiming for in the work.
GB: When that intuitive, sometimes uneasy balance takes shape in the painting, what kind of encounter do you hope the viewer has with it? Are you inviting a similarly bodily, intuitive way of looking, or do you see the work holding space for viewers to sit with uncertainty and arrive at their own sense of balance over time?
AW: I suppose both, but sitting with uncertainty is where I am trying to be within my life and my work and that is perhaps what I aim for in the viewing experience. I want the viewer to be able to see things that might be a suggestion of something familiar, but is also strange, and might prompt a feeling or memory, but also doesn’t quite crystalise. Things are constantly in flux, intra-acting. Bayo Akomolafe says “We begin at the edges in the middle”, and this makes sense to me when viewing a painting – there is no beginning or end point that we arrive at necessarily; it is more some sort of messy middle where feelings fizz and brew and we can’t quite pin point our exact thoughts – but ultimately that is what expands us and opens us up to the infinite, just like the endless possibilities in making a painting.
Amy Winstanley (born 1983, UK) is an artist based in south west Scotland. She has a MA from the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam (2017-19) and a BA (Hons) in Sculpture from the Edinburgh College of Art (2001-05).
Amy's paintings are a reflection of the continual flux of all things whilst the action of painting, and immediacy of paint, fosters a means to take ahold of, and explore, her ideas. She is fascinated with entanglement on all scales, the intertwining of human and nonhuman relationships, and reads into eco-philosophy, feminist theory, and indigenous thought. Whilst painting, thoughts merge from this research with intuitive mark making drawn from personal experience, emotion and memory. As a result the paintings reside between a suggestion of things and an un-doing of depiction in a fluid way.
Recent solo exhibitions include, Life Hum, Margot Samel, New York (2025), Focus programme at Workplace Gallery, London (2025), Homing at Ginsberg Gallery, Lima, Peru (2024), Soft Spot at A_Place gallery, Glasgow (2024), Slim Glimpses at Cample Line, Dumfriesshire (2023) and Lost Hapat Margot Samel, New York (2023). Recent group exhibitions include The Persistence of Painting, Patricia Fleming, Glasgow (2025), Out of Earth, The Approach, London (2024), Opening at A_Place, Glasgow (2023) and Strangers at Rongwrong, Amsterdam (2022).
Amy is represented by Margot Samel, New York.
Image courtesy the artist.
Image courtesy the artist and Margot Samel.
2025
Oil on canvas
84x76cm