Artist: Amber Lily

A woman crouching next to a rectangular, colourful textile piece hanging from a metal rod. The wall hanging is primarily pink and orange, with brown, black and green abstract shapes stitched or embroidered over it; the shapes and the piece are outlined with yellow thread.

The Everyday

BA Textiles in Practice
Manchester School of Art

Amber is an artist, designer and colourist.

Amber’s textile practice focuses on colour, texture and mark-making. Playful, fluid and abstract in her approach, she takes inspiration from the forms, patterns, shapes and colours that she encounters in her day-to-day life. Experimenting with layering, scale and proportion, each quilt, framed and 3D artwork is defined by its own colour palette. Using a range of material processes, Amber works with monoprint, screen-printing, gelli plate printing, dyeing, embroidery and collage to create artworks that capture the joy she experiences through looking and making.

Find out more

amberlilystudio

www.amberlilystudio.co.uk

AmberYearsley_SubjectMundane-mainoption2

Clockwise from top left: Subject Mundane; React; Energy; Flo

In:Site 2024

Amber was one of 14 artists selected to produce a participatory, drop-in workshop for a public audience at In:Site 2024. Exploring the theme of care, their workshop developed and incorporated the ideas, techniques, approaches and materials used in their own practice.

A young woman with her hair tied back holding a glue stick, making a collage of differently coloured and textured papers. There are paints, papers, and other collages around her.

Photograph by Hayley Salter

Through her project, Mixed Media Collage, which responded to the colour palette and marks made or left by people in the Cathedral, Amber helped people to make paper-based assemblages incorporating collage, stitch and drawing techniques and using layering, scale and proportion to make individual pieces.

Three collages held up by a pair of hands. The left hand collage is square, made up of striped, circled, coloured in, and cut out paper shapes in pink, yellow, black, white, and army green. The central collage is made up of larger sections of coloured paper, drawn on in pink pen and yellow and blue crayons. The right hand collage is four sections of paper - orange, yellow, and green scraps, topped with a red paper with stars drawn on it.

A paintbrush being used on a collage of yellow and orange papers. The collage is surrounded by other collages, and oil pastels.

Someone flicking through a large transparent box of homemade and home-dyed colourful scraps of paper. There is a sheet of paper on the table in front of them, with lots of different kinds of mark making have been tried out.

Someone opening a blue felt pen to use on the collage in front of them. They have pasted scraps of colourful, handmade, abstractly shaped paper, and then drawn and painted over it in various colours. A pink pencil and pieces of paper surround the collage.

Photographs by Hayley Salter