Agial Art Gallery invites you to the opening of Amy Todman's exhibition “and the smell of the flowers is everything I don’t say” on Friday 28 July at 5:00-8:00pm.

Washes of earthy greens, ocean blues, cold greys, and dreamy pinks draw the spaces within which Amy Todman narrates around windows. The painted mark on the canvas morphs into part of a picturesque landscape, while washes in acrylic reveal the painting hand and its double on the canvas. At moments, the white windows sever parts of bodies and landscape; at others, they appear as canvases embraced by bodies and reflecting them. The canvas object becomes a riddle echoed in its doubling within each of Todman's framed windows. Scenes of her domestic space seep into the frame as the table, bed, and sleeping bodies reappear as themselves, their shadow, or their painted other. The artist marks the windows, opens them, and plunges into them while the translucence of her vision is mounted around an oceanic feeling that attributes tension to the theme of the window, dissolving its frame. Amidst the openings she creates, appear vignettes that stand between dream and waking life, a glass of water becomes its stains, a bitten fruit manifests as a fragment, and objects acquire creaturely limbs that stain the canvas. Todman's works lace the beautiful with the sublime while knotting the gesture of painting with being and dwelling. 

Amy Todman is an artist and writer from Scotland who is making her home in Beirut, Lebanon. 

Selected recent solo exhibitions include The Partial Foreground (Henrik Igyityan National Centre for Aesthetics, Yerevan, Armenia) and From Here to There (Dalan Art Gallery, Yerevan, Armenia). She has published two poetry collections, Twig (2019) and G(love) (Sad Press, 2018) as well as the artist book Cover (Brae Editions, 2014).

She holds a fine art degree from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (Dundee, Scotland),  an MLitt in the History of Collecting and Collections from the University of Glasgow and a PhD, which examines the development of the idea of landscape in Britain during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Latterly, she was Curator of Art and Political Collections at the National Library of Scotland, in the department of Manuscripts and Archives. 

In 2018 she took a decision to re-focus on her art practice, finding her way, via Armenia, to Lebanon, where the warm and intelligent heart of Beirut has had a profound and enduring impact on her painting, poetry, and her understanding of the world.