Artist Biography

Graduating from the School of the Arts at the University of Pretoria in 2025, and a recipient of the Barnard Bettie Cilliers Bursary for Painting, Amelia Marais is a painter whose practice is rooted in material engagement and embodied process. Her work is premised on the belief that artworks cannot be produced without entering into a vulnerable exchange with materials that respond, resist, and reveal.

Working primarily with oil paint, acrylic, and wall paint on unstretched canvas, Marais employs dense, paint-loaded brushstrokes to enact bodily movement, emotion, and presence in the moment of making. These gestures function as a form of documentation, recording the intra-actions between artist, material, and environment as the paint settles, shifts, and changes over time.

Influenced by Karen Barad’s theory of post-humanist performativity, Marais understands material not as inert matter but as an active participant in meaning-making. Her paintings hold both the artist’s knowledge and that which emerges through the agency of the material itself. By foregrounding surface, repetition, and gesture, painting becomes a form of manual knowledge rather than a secondary vehicle for concept.

Leaving her works unstretched and allowing earlier layers to remain visible, Marais challenges traditional hierarchies within painting, particularly the passive coding of the ground. Her practice invites slow, affective engagement, creating space for ambiguity, intimacy, and continual transformation, questioning patriarchal structures and the notion of singular artistic authorship.

She is currently doing her Master’s of Fine Art at the School of the Arts, University of Pretoria.