Amber Wallis

b. 1978

Selected works
Exhibitions
Artist CV

My work demonstrates my desire to paint with technical limitations, where painting becomes an exercise in restraint and quiet consideration. They necessitate a delicate hand. I never allow the paintings to be over worked or laboured. What remains is a very conscious intention to leave images in their magical first conceptions, or to hold that feeling despite the application. The paint is allowed and encouraged to stain; referencing colour field paintings and soak stain technique.

Conceptually I’m broadly interested in blurring the lines between domesticity and erotic fantasy, interior space and landscape while allowing ambiguous figures to occupy the works. Additionally I am interested in notions of care, in women’s experiences of steadfastness, protection and guardianship; and simultaneously our invisibility. I navigate my experience of being a woman and single mother through this terrain alongside the psychological space of architecture from the 1970s handmade house movement. This references my early childhood living within the dropout counterculture of New Zealand, as well as my current place of residence in Northern NSW, the home of Australia’s first counter cultural communities. 

Wallis holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts from the Canberra School of Art and a
Master of Visual Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts. In 2022, she was
awarded the inaugural Wollumbin Art Award at Tweed Regional Gallery and previously won the Brett Whiteley Traveling Art Scholarship (2008). She has been
a finalist in several art prizes including the Sir John Sulman Prize (2025, 2024),
Bayside Painting Prize (2025), Geelong Contemporary Art Award (2024), Evelyn
Chapman Art Award (2022), Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize (2019). She has
completed residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris and the Nancy
Fairfax Artist Residency at Tweed Regional Gallery. She has exhibited extensively
since 2009 including in exhibitions at Ngununggula (2025), Ipswich Art Gallery
(2024), Lismore Regional Gallery (2021, 2011), the Art Gallery of New South Wales
(2008), the Ian Potter Museum of Art (2009).