Amanda Berridge is a textile artist based in Hampshire. After a career in the City she recently graduated for the second time in Fine Art from the University of Chichester and was selected for the Platform Graduate Award 2022. She has just become a studio member at ArtSpace Portsmouth.

Amanda makes works from old household textiles and transforms the cloth with rust marks, resist dyeing, printing and stitch. She is led by the chance marks and erasures made by these processes to create images which are abstract but evocative. She uses the history bound up in domestic textiles and hand stitch to add layers of meaning. She seeks to explore the “fabric of society”, looking at war, national identity and immigration.

Her interests include politics, literature and historic buildings and artefacts. Key artistic influences include Cornelia Parker, Annette Messager, Anselm Kieffer and Louise Bourgeois for their high impact installations and wry intelligence. Alice Kettle, a neighbour in Winchester, was an early inspiration, as are Doris Salcedo and Mona Hatoum’s work on refugee issues using discarded objects and the simplest of gestures to create works of austere beauty and emotional power.