ABOUT

BIOGRAPHY
Amanda Lilleston is a Maine-based printmaker and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the interconnected relationships between anatomy, ecology, and the living world. Working primarily in woodcut, screenprint, lithography, and paper collage, she builds large-scale compositions from printed fragments that move between anatomical, botanical, and abstract forms.

Lilleston’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Triton Museum of Art, Zillman Art Museum, SNAP Gallery, and the Franciscan Museum and Gallery Gorica Livno. Recent recognition includes Second Prize at the 4th International Triennial of Graphic Arts in Livno and the Relief Prize at the Atlanta Print Biennial.

Her work is held in museum, university, and private collections, including the Flint Institute of Arts, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Colby College Museum of Art, Zillman Art Museum, and MDI Biological Laboratory.

Lilleston holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and a BA in Biology from Colorado College. She is Assistant Professor of Art at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

ARTIST STATEMENT
My work investigates the porous boundaries between bodies and their environments. I am interested in biological systems that complicate the idea of the individual: the microorganisms that inhabit us, cells exchanged between bodies, substances absorbed from our surroundings, and the continual movement of material across what appear to be stable boundaries.

The concept of the holobiont—an organism understood together with the communities of microorganisms that live within and around it—has become particularly important to my thinking. It offers a model of the body not as an autonomous entity, but as an assemblage formed through ongoing relationships with other organisms and environments. Questions of self and non-self, interdependence, permeability, growth, and transformation recur throughout the work.

I approach these ideas through printmaking, a medium inherently structured around repetition and variation. I print anatomical, botanical, and cellular imagery through woodcut, lithography, and screenprint, then cut apart and reassemble those images into larger compositions. Forms are repeated, fragmented, obscured, and joined to others. Rather than beginning with a predetermined composition, I allow relationships to develop through the physical process of assembling the work.

The resulting images move between scales. A form might suggest cellular tissue, a flowering plant, an internal organ, or an ecological landscape without resolving completely into any one of them. I am interested in that instability: the possibility that the structures within a body might resemble the structures through which organisms relate to one another in the larger living world.

SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, Michigan

Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, Indiana

Portland Public Library, Portland, Maine

Zillman Art Museum, Bangor, Maine

MDI Biological Laboratory, Bar Harbor, Maine

Franciscan Museum and Gallery Gorica Livno, Livno, Bosnia and Herzegovina