Amy McLean

Artist Statement

I’m a visual artist from Fife, working primarily in painting and tattoo artistry. My practice challenges the psychological and philosophical foundations of creative conventions, placing greater value on process and interpersonal connection than on fixed outcomes. My degree show series — and ongoing project — Seeing Double explores visual coincidence, memory, and the human impulse to connect and organise disparate forms. Drawing on sources such as 19th-century photography, Shaun of the Dead, Celtic FC, and tattoo culture, I examine how attention, context, and cognitive bias shape our perception of relationships between images. Through recurring motifs and split compositions, I use duality and repetition as both method and subject. Referencing concepts like Deleuze’s rhizome, I resist linear narratives in favour of associative logic, where meaning emerges through adjacency, slippage, and echo. The work reflects how images entangle over time, mirroring the overload of contemporary visual culture. I invite viewers to navigate this visual chaos and dwell in ambiguity — where close attention to a single detail might unravel wider networks of connection, bias, and categorisation, mapping the mechanisms of our own perception.