Video transcript | ARTEXPRESS 2023 | Student interviews | Amelia Spinks – The Stolen Relic
AMELIA SPINKS: Hi. My name is Amelia Spinks. I studied visual arts at Albury High School. So my body of work is mostly about the vividness of storytelling. So stories, movies, and books, everything like that is really important to me. And I think stories, they're able to have a huge impact on people, and I wanted to share my experience of the vividness, I feel, of characters and stories and everything that goes along with that.
I wanted to share it with others. But, yeah, it started basically with writing in English. I used the characters-- must have been 2020, I think, in a short story competition, just like a local one. And that was kind of like the first thing that I ever used with them. And then, yeah, I just-- it's something that I've continued to draw, which I love drawing just my own characters. And then, yeah, I suppose all of them sort of just developed over time from there. And then I've always loved Disney and just various animated movies, whether it's anime like the Studio Ghibli films, that sort of thing.
The comic only came about halfway through me making the actual artwork. And that was because I just started reading this webcomic by an artist called Sarah Jolley. It was called The Property of Hate. And it's like an ongoing thing. It's been going for like 10 years. It's the same sort of style as my comic, like the sort of cartoon characters. And it's like-- it's this adventure that brings to life emotions and stuff as physical things. Like inanimate objects, they're alive and doing stuff, just like a really fun, whimsical sort of thing. 
So that was a big inspiration for the comic side. When I was researching artists for my body of work, there's this artist that I found called Kat Johnston, who made sculptural things like little figures. They were animal hybrids. So she used-- one of them was a moth man, and it used not just clay material. It used various other fabric and fur and stuff.
And so I incorporated that into mine, using fabric and feathers and things in my sculptures. I already did have the characters, so that was already sort of done because I had been drawing them for a long time. But in my art book, I started by doing character sheets, as a point of reference. So I did a fully illustrated and coloured picture of each of the characters and some turnarounds. So they were facing different directions and stuff to use for reference for the sculptures.
I used polymer clay for just the base of them. They all have a wire skeleton. So what I would do is make the skeleton from the wire in the pose that I wanted it to be and then build the clay on top of that. And they were done originally on these wood blocks that had holes drilled into them so that they would stand up when I was working on it. And then they basically just go in the oven, and they cook.
And I was using just white clay, so they were just white canvases, ready for me to paint on. And then, yeah, paint them and then add on whichever extra materials they were going to have—for example, the feathers. The wings of that character was probably the most difficult thing to do because I had never done anything like that before. What that-- it was just a lot of trial and error basically. So the wings—the skeleton of them, that was built into the base skeleton of the figure, like outstretched like that. And then I wound them with wool and tried to glue on feathers, and it didn't really work. So I ended up having to sew on each feather individually by hand. The rest of them basically just followed the same process-- sculpt, paint. 
And then the comic, that was done on Procreate on my iPad with Apple Pencil. And I've had that program for a couple of years, so I kind of already was familiar with how it works. Yeah, and I just sort of sketched out each page, just solidifying everything with clear lines and things and adding in the speech bubbles. It definitely took a long time. It was basically every study period that I had that wasn't dedicated to something else. When I didn't have an assignment for another class that I needed to be working on, it was up in the art room working on that. Yeah, because it just wasn't enough time in class. It's probably something like 10 to 12 hours per sculpture.
It's been great to be included in ARTEXPRESS. I went to the Sydney exhibition a couple of weeks ago, just like-- I think it was the day before it ended because we live like 5 and 1/2 hours away. So I didn't get to go to the opening night. So we only got to go that one time. But it was amazing. The amount of different things there, we were like-- we were blown away by everything. It was really cool. And it is, yeah, it's an honour to be displayed along with all these other incredible things.
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