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PUT YOUR HAND WHERE IT HURTS
Amy Cuneo

 

Amy Cuneo is a multi-disciplinary artist working and living gratefully on Dharawal land. Cuneo’s subjects link us to essential and reassuring elements in our lives. Flowers, food, a window framing the sky, these are images that bind, as clearly as their colours shift under changing light. Her everyday assemblages weave lived experience and the natural world. The comforts of home are pictured in her work in their intimate objecthood. Enduring themes of care-giving, motherhood and the natural world are found in her work. Born in Charleville, Qld in 1985, Amy Cuneo grew up in country NSW. She graduated from ACU in 2012 with a double major in Visual Arts and Literature. She has exhibited in various group exhibitions from 2017 including ‘Florals’ at Michael Reid Gallery and had her first solo exhibition at AK Bellinger Gallery in 2019. She has been a finalist in many art prizes, most recently the Fisher’s Ghost Art Prize and the Flow Watercolour Prize at Wollongong Art Gallery, (2023). Her work is included in various private collections throughout Australia, New Zealand and Sweden and has been collected by Tiers & Co Collecting Group.

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This series of work documents the act of care. Care-giving in the domestic, in the world, and within selfhood. We hold up the sky but kneel for shoelaces. A day (and indeed a life) is made up of many small consequential acts like kitchen chores or table setting and through these paintings the gaze is turned toward these intimate moments.

 

Throughout Put Your Hand Where it Hurts references are drawn from meditation, interruptions, music, prayer and poetry. Nick Cave, the renowned Singer/Songwriter, poignantly reflects: “Hope rises out of known suffering and is the defiant and dissenting spark that refuses to be extinguished”. While the works may appear buoyant at first glance, there is a deliberate act of defiance at play. To raise children, to keep a garden and to maintain joy in a broader landscape of collective anxiety, war and retribution requires work and attention. It needs cultivation.

 

The culmination of these broader ideas brings about these works built from composite images taken from life and the imagined. The works begin as seeds and from that place a series of actions and responses take place. The paintings unfold over time through the build up of transparent layers and ideas that may later be retracted. The seen and unseen aspects of the paintings work together to create a unity. The outcome is these playful, awkward- and I hope- life affirming paintings.