Amanda Spearman Portfolio

I am a BFA student at Texas Tech University studying Printmaking. I have been making art my entire life and love to experiment and make new things. My style changes to fit a commission or my mood the day I am creating something. Here you will find a constantly updated portfolio of my works.

Currently I use my art as a form of personal healing, therapy, and storytelling. I force the uncomfortable subject of my trauma on to the viewer by using Ero Guro Nonsensu (Ero Guro), a Japanese art movement that emphasizes the grotesque in a sexual manner to fore an audience to be uncomfortable and to think for themselves, or to just be uncomfortable to view as not all trauma needs to be explained or can be explained. There is also a personal/internal vs. public/external form of my works. The personal and internal has a rhetoric of intense violence, either against myself or a faceless figure; along with this violence is the rhetoric of mutilation of the human body as an expression of therapy. Through using female bodies that are mutilated or altered I reveal a truth of violence not only on myself, as I identify as a female, but also on our currently lived reality of other women. There is a potential for an exhibition that forces the audience to engage with uncomfortable and gross subjects. The public and external side is visually expressing the inexpressible, such as emotions one feels or specific events that can’t be explained in words for many reasons. People tend to not talk about such things and try to avoid contemplating horror of all kinds (excluding horror junkies and many artists). The purpose of my art is to force a catharsis, or a feeling of lived empathy. Parallels can also be drawn to Asian Yokai culture, which are a class of Japanese demons, monsters, etc. The more violent and awful a death was (mostly to women) the stronger and scarier she would come back; this sort of gives the yokai an empowerment from their “damage.” The more grotesque and mutilated the body in my work, the more empowered I feel when creating it. The last element of my art is the BDSM use, either as clothing, or tight chains and chokers on the already mutilated and grotesque body. There is a focus on sexual corruption and BDSM elements already in Ero Guro, but in mine personally I am drawn to using BDSM elements to show a lack of control I have had in past traumatic events and parts of my life. Either losing control to another person, or to myself and my mind. In BDSM relationships there is usually trust, something I still have a very hard time giving to anyone and it fascinates me the level of trust couples and people have in one another in the BDSM community. I still am exploring farther in to how it completely fits in with my art and story other than it being a part of the art movement and style I draw from, and from my aesthetic attraction to it.