My painting practice involves a constant negotiation between digital experimentation and analogue painting as I navigate the productive tensions and mistranslations that occur when working between these two modes. 

Central to my painting process is a cyclical method of planning, revision, and rethinking. I continuously fold past into present by cutting up and incorporating previous paintings into new ones. These offcuts, embedded materially within the image, invite viewers to come closer to work out what is painted versus what is physically stuck to the canvas. This dual approach of applied layering generates perceptual friction and embodies the ongoing act of reuse and reinterpretation.  

Like physical materials, images and text are also subject to reuse and reinterpretation. In Hue Drift, I adapt illustrations from my archive of 1990s/early 2000s stickers, which I scan and digitally collage into the painting’s composition using Photoshop. While painting, I continuously return to the digital space to add new elements into the composition, updating and revising, covering and revealing previous areas on the canvas. Fragments of found text sometimes function as self-reflexive annotations, commentary of my iterative thinking-through the problems of both painting and image-making. Semantic friction is created when images and text don’t quite align. Therefore, meaning emerges slowly, through processes of accumulation, fragmentation, and adaptation. 

The work’s title, Hue Drift, refers to digitally altering colours through the intuitive, speculative action of sliding Photoshop’s hue adjustment. Its resulting physical palette is thus digitally informed but can never match the light-filled intensity of the screens that it mimics. It is this irreconcilable mismatch, the continual drift between digital expectation and painted reality, which drives my paintings forward and keeps me constantly curious.

Amy Potenger (b. 1988) is a Tāmaki Makaurau-based artist. She is a painter currently working towards a practice-led PhD at AUT University and has recently completed a printmaking residency at Auckland Print Studios in Ruakākā. She has been a finalist in the NZ Painting and Printmaking Awards, the National Contemporary Art Awards, and the Cleveland Art Awards, and her work is held in private collections in Aotearoa.

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