Amanda Forward is a self-taught artist based in Geraldton, Western Australia, working primarily in oil painting, alongside sculpture, photography and film.
Her paintings move between figuration and abstraction, exploring the relationships between people, wildlife and the environment they inhabit.
Recognizable forms meet ambiguous spaces, allowing narratives to emerge without being fully resolved. Forward's work looks at how ancestry, culture, and environment shape identity and belonging, and how a deeper understanding of ourselves can influence the way we connect to the world.
Immersion is central to Forward’s practice. A life spent travelling, living and working in wild environments brings her into contact with different landscapes, cultures and ways of life.
Before turning into a fulltime artist, Forward spent more than fifteen years working in Australia’s marine industry, pearl diving, aquaculture and commercial construction diving. Working underwater and travelling across remote regions shaped her relationship with the natural world and stretched her capabilities immensely. Water, flow and the earth beneath remains an enduring influence.
A formative year in the middle-east regions in 2017 culminated in her first solo exhibition, Inside Out, in Old Jaffa. That experience established exhibition-making as an integral part of her practice: bringing together paintings, atmosphere and sound to shape how an audience encounters the work and themselves.
Working from Studio a.f, Forward balances deliberate composition with an expressionistic lens. Her practice develops through sustained exploration of a theme, with painting, sculpture and film offering different ways to breathe life into form. Storytelling connects these approaches, creating space for shared experience while leaving the work open to the viewer’s own memories, associations and interpretation.