AMY MACK
Unrehearsed Memories, 2024
Unrehearsed Memories is a video performance where I sit on a bed and move, without any script, through Childhood, Teen Years, and Adulthood as an act of remembering in real time. It’s shaped entirely by what I can and can’t pull back in the moment, so hesitation, repetition, and forgetting all end up becoming part of the work rather than mistakes in it.
As I go, I try to bring back the voices of people who have hurt me, slipping into their tone, cadence, and accents as they surface in my memory. It’s unpredictable and a bit unsettling how quickly they come back. These fragments show how certain language doesn’t really stay in the past—it sticks in the body, and keeps shaping how you see yourself long after the moment has passed.
Installation of Unrehearsed Memories
Projection on wall in busy hallway in the LSAD
Amy McNamara explores vulnerability, insecurity and contradiction using dark humour through performance, photography, video, and installation. Beginning with looking at herself, Amy examines her worries, problems, anxieties and then observes how these problems are reflected to her from others, the everyday lived experience. This approach enables Amy to not only process her own vulnerabilities and insecurities, but also questions the pressures and expectations that shape everyday life.
I Practice Arguments in My Head, 2024
I Practice Arguments in My Head started with a phrase I couldn’t stop thinking about. After seeing Sven Sachsalber’s Finding a Needle in a Haystack (2014), I became interested in the way he took a familiar expression and made it physical. That led me to “spilling the beans” and to wondering what it might look like to literally pour out the thoughts I usually keep to myself.
In the video, every time I pour a handful of beans, I confess something. These are my own secrets, mistakes I’ve made, bad decisions, and things I would usually keep to myself. Nothing is imagined.
Installation of I Practice Arguments in My Head
40'' Television, placed on ground in busy hallway at LSAD
I installed the piece on a TV placed directly on the floor in a busy hallway, so viewers had to slow down, crouch, or awkwardly adjust their bodies to watch it. That physical discomfort mirrors the emotional one in the work. It interrupts a passing space with something confessional, asking people, if only for a moment, to sit with what it means to let something out.
Drown It Out, 2024
Drown It Out came out of a really intense point in my life, and also from learning new video skills during work experience with artist Shane Vaughan. I was about to buy a house with my boyfriend of over 15 years, right across from my childhood home, so everything felt very familiar, almost settled. I knew the neighbours, the streets, the rhythm of it. Then, five days before we were due to sign, we broke up.In that moment I realised I didn’t love him anymore, because of the control, the manipulation, and the way I was being treated more like a maid than a partner. But I did love my house. I had packed and unpacked all our belongings into it, cleaned every inch of it because it had been vacant for years and left in such a state by previous tenants, and slowly made it my own. I owned everything in it, the furniture, crockery, cutlery, glassware, towels, sheets, everything. So in a strange way, leaving MY home was harder than leaving him.
After the breakup I ended up back living with my parents, still across the road from him, in this very uneasy in-between space. I felt mentally overwhelmed, stuck in my own head, and constantly trying to manage it all. I buried myself in college work and in small, repetitive everyday tasks. Anything to drown out the noise of it all, especially this new feeling of shame I had as a result of having to live with my parents after 18 years of living independantly.
The film takes those ordinary routines and lets them slowly build into something more unsettling. We see walking, keys, doors, making tea, switching things on and off, simple domestic actions that feel almost automatic. But underneath it there’s this constant humming sound that no one can locate. She keeps trying to fix it, switching things off, unplugging everything, searching for the source, but it never goes away.Eventually she tries to drown it out with music, putting in earphones and shutting everything else off. For a moment it works, but then the sound returns anyway, louder, heavier, impossible to ignore. It becomes internal, turning into a voice that repeats “let me out” over and over, breaking down into frustration, pleading, and exhaustion.
For me, Drown It Out is about that feeling of trying to keep functioning while everything underneath you is unravelling, trying to quiet your head with routine, until you realise you can’t actually switch yourself off.
Burden of Thought, 2022
Burden of Thought comes from my own experience of insomnia, anxiety, and health worries. It explores that frustrating space between being exhausted and being unable to sleep, where thoughts spiral, time stretches, and every small sensation feels amplified.Using obscure camera angles and layered audio, I wanted to recreate what it feels like to be trapped inside your own head. The film explores the way anxiety and sleep deprivation blur the line between mind and body, creating a cycle that feels impossible to switch off.I intentionally made the film over six minutes long so viewers might experience a small part of what insomnia feels like, the repetitive question that keeps returning in the middle of the night: Will this ever end?'