The HPO Intimate & Immersive series provides a unique concert space where multimedia artists works alongside the orchestra to bring contemporary music to life, elevating the listening experience with captivating visuals. This year, Intimate & Immersive concerts feature artwork by artist, filmmaker and educator Amy McIntosh. She is a founding member of Hamilton Audio Visual Node (HAVN) and loves to develop creative projects that include community participation. Currently Hamilton and Toronto-based and a 2013 graduate of McMaster University, Amy mainly draws artistic inspiration from a childhood spent living in rural Southwestern Ontario.
“I was born and raised in the country, so much of my childhood was spent exploring the forests, rivers and fields around me. I built forts, picked flowers, and collected unique found objects that I stored away, or used in creative ways. Simultaneously, I had an obsession with movies and television, and have since directed my artistic career towards media art. My practice involves experimenting with materials and processes related to mixed media, installation, sound, video and analogue mediums. Using archive, inquiry, and experience, I explore how ideas of place are expressed, and the interrelationships and connections we find between our environment’s temporal spaces, people and histories. Through the collection and assemblage of found objects, recycled materials, and seasonal debris, I create transformative forms with new contexts and stories.”
– Amy McIntosh on her artistic inspiration
At Intimate & Immersive: Our Wondrous World, the works performed will be elevated by Amy’s corresponding nature-inspired creations made with an experimental practice that she took up during the pandemic: cyanotype printmaking. This is a photographic printing process that originated in the early 1800s and can be used to produce cyan-blue prints. “The visual effect is distinct and versatile,” says Amy, “allowing the ability to print on a variety of surfaces.”
“I’ve been collecting natural fall debris from around my Hamilton neighbourhood and exposing the outline of these items through a cyanotype print. The internal details of these items appear where light passes through the object, exposing the macro and micro designs of nature. For this project I’m exploring composition and arrangement with botanicals and found objects by printing on fabrics, paper and recycled materials. I am creating a large, sound-reactive, illuminated tapestry that will hang above the orchestra. I will also incorporate projected visuals that play with a video technique called infinite zoom. Thematically, I’m thinking about the immeasurable great expanse and scale of our ‘wondrous world’, the sublime, and the complex systems that nurture and sustain life.”
– Amy McIntosh on cyanotype printmaking for Intimate & Immersive: Our Wondrous World
Through the collection and assemblage of found objects, recycled materials and seasonal debris, Amy creates transformative compositions and forms with new contexts and stories. Using cyanotype printmaking, sculpture and video, Amy’s artistic work at Intimate & Immersive: Our Wondrous World will focus on the small things in nature that we overlook, that grow and become more efficient over time, building up to large forms and creating complex systems that nurture and sustain life. Amy aims for her artwork to evoke a sense of familiarity in audience members. They may recognize something specific like a piece of nature that inspired them, or perhaps a memory will come to mind. “My hope is for this art piece to marry with the music and create a feeling of immersion, connectedness and appreciation for the forms that exist around us,” says Amy.
We thank Amy for sharing her own Wondrous World of nature and cyanotype printmaking with us. We can’t wait to see the gorgeous results of everything she has created to bring the works performed at Intimate & Immersive: Our Wondrous World on October 28 to life at The Cotton Factory!