Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amandambarr/
Website: https://www.amandambarr.com/
Biography
Amanda Barr is an artist, educator, curator, and author who holds an MA in Modern Languages, an MA in Art History, and an MFA in Studio Art. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including galleries in the UK, Spain, France, the US and Canada, and she is published in both English and Spanish. Currently she is the Assistant Professor of Ceramics and Art History at New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico.
Artist Statement
I use my own history of trauma, abuse, and disability to create objects that are at once culturally recognizable and highly personal; it is my hope that each viewer will recognize the overarching themes and identify them within their own experiences, thus encountering a moment of reflection, empathy, or even catharsis. My work is meant to be uncomfortable, to evoke a sense of anxiety or disquiet. Trauma is a disruption, so my work is created to be eerily beautiful, delicate and fine porcelain and glass formed into shapes with unsettling evocations. Society may prefer we not address this, but only by confronting and addressing them can we move forward.
Double tap
Hand-built New Zealand porcelain, one piece with underglaze inlay and glaze, fired at cone 7 electric
12”h x 30”w x 30”d
2025
$2300
double tap
25 August 2025, Nassar Hospital, Gaza. As rescue workers and journalists scramble up a stairwell in the wake of a deadly bomb strike, a secondary explosion is captured on a live-feed. Israel would temporarily attempt to justify this action by claiming a camera operated by Hussam al-Masri was Hamas. In reality, the camera belonged to the international news agency, Reuters, and al-Masri became one of more than 200 journalists murdered.
In the wake of two, now three, years of active apartheid and genocide, watching every imaginable human atrocity committed against men, women, and so, so many children, it’s hard to know what there is left to say other than what the fuck are we doing? How are we compartmentalizing this reality with theirs? With photos of bloody cameras, bullet-riddled cars, bulldozers and bodies and bones, too many bones. Children are being disabled at astronomical rates, mostly due to traumatic amputation, starvation, and a lack of proper medical supplies.
Silence is complicity. Discomfort is a bare minimum.
I make work about trauma, disability, and things that our culture would rather hide from. There has been no need to abstract or allegorize the images coming from Palestine; the stark horror of child-sized bones rendered in beautifully delicate porcelain is all too stark and visceral on its own.
I should have known it was all a lie
wheel thrown New Zealand porcelain with underglaze inlay, glaze, lithium wash, and Kanthal wire, fired at cone 7 electric
17”h x 7”w x 6”d
2026
$650
I should have known it was all a lie
“The first lie” is taught to be the Devil to Eve, and hers the first sin. Persephone is tricked into marriage with Hades by eating six pomegranate seeds. Pele, Oshun, Circe, Medusa, Pandora, Callisto, Cassandra, Russian rusalkas and La Llorona– women are repeatedly blamed for what befalls them, outright punished, and used as eschatological proof that all women must too be treated as manipulative and deceptive, mentally and emotionally inferior, or purely evil.
This isn’t just myth; it was cold and ruthless propaganda to perpetuate the dehumanization of an entire gender for the sake of power. It was a series of lies couched in religious robes to rob us of confidence, of authority, of the simple act of being believed. Centuries of women have been convinced they are lesser, all because of a story about an apple. Or was it a pomegranate?