Amy Spiers is a Melbourne-based artist and writer interested in socially engaged and participatory art. She employs a cross-disciplinary approach that includes photography, video, installation, text, performance and public intervention for both site-specific and gallery contexts.

Amy completed a Master of Fine Art at the Victorian College of Art in 2011. During her studies she explored strategies for inviting viewer participation in her art and completed a thesis entitled The limits of sociability: An exploration of the possibilities and pitfalls of participatory art.

Informed by critics such as Claire Bishop and Miwon Kwon, her practice is interested in the complex conditions and contingencies required for people to meet and come together. Rather than affirming and celebrating meetings, as so much relational and socially-engaged art does, her work considers the intricate barriers to human connection and thematises the limits of sociability. As such, failed moments of connection are as integral to her works as are their instants of surprising engagement.

Amy has presented numerous art projects in festivals and galleries across Australia, including Melbourne Fringe, Next Wave (Melbourne), Tiny Stadiums (Sydney), This Is Not Art (Newcastle), Performance Space (Sydney), BUS Projects (Melbourne), six_a ARI (Hobart) and SASA Gallery (Adelaide).

Amy is also in a creative collaboration with writer Victoria Stead, Agents of Proximity, which ran a localised travel service in Brunswick for the 2008 Next Wave Festival and presented Destiny Exchange/Pertukaran Nasib in Yogyakarta, Indonesia as part of The South Project Gathering in 2009.

As an arts writer, Amy has written for Live Art List Australia blog, un magazine, Artlink, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces and RMIT gallery.

amyspiers@gmail.com