Amanda Phillips

Amanda Phillips is an Edinburgh-based artist whose practice brings together painting, architecture, engineering and an enduring fascination with line. Originally trained as a painter, Phillips went on to become a chartered architect, before teaching across fine art, design and architecture at Edinburgh College of Art and Edinburgh Napier University for more than a decade. Her work has been recognised with awards in both architecture and painting.

Phillips’ architectural background is deeply embedded in her approach to painting. Tartan and graph papers frequently become part of her compositions, their grids introducing structure, rhythm and visual complexity. Diagrams, mathematical symbols and references to industry and engineering are woven into layered surfaces, creating a dialogue between the precise and the expressive.

More recently, Phillips has turned her attention towards the atmosphere and memory of landscape. Her paintings explore not only how a landscape looks, but how it feels and sounds—the marks within them acting almost as a visual soundtrack to an experienced place. Rather than creating straightforward representations, she seeks to create an experience for the viewer, leaving space for personal interpretation and changing associations.

Working spontaneously and experimentally, Phillips builds her paintings through layers of colour, texture and mark-making. Each layer reveals something different, inviting the viewer to look more closely and return to the work repeatedly. Her landscapes are less about recording a particular place than capturing a response to it: an atmospheric, visually poetic interpretation of landscape, memory and experience.