I'm Amelia Brook,

a painter working in collage, acrylic paint, and oil pastel. My work interrogates the imagery surrounding women in social media and mass media, the visual language of a turbo-consumer culture that simultaneously empowers and consumes its subjects.

My work begins with the aesthetics of social media: women in moments of leisure and self-presentation, curating their own visibility, and the objects and backdrops that populate that world. I dissect and reframe these through collage and paint, approaching each piece as an act of aesthetic investigation. The women in my work exist in tension, confident and consumed, controlling their image while being controlled by the platforms that distribute it.

This isn't an abstract concern. I grew up alongside social media. It shaped how I understood visibility, desirability, and what it meant to be looked at as a young woman. I still think about it: what I post, how it will land, whether I look the right amount of effortless. It is exhausting. And I am not separate from it.

My practice is my attempt to disentangle myself from something I am still inside. To take these images apart and ask: who does this serve? What does it cost? I don't always have answers. But the act of dissecting, of remaking these images on my own terms, feels like the closest thing to freedom I've found.

Working in large-scale canvases with high-gloss varnish finishes, the work is characterised by fearless colour: electric blues against vibrant oranges, deep pinks colliding with rich greens. The gloss is deliberate. It mirrors the polished perfection of social media imagery while making the work pulse with its own energy. These are not decorative objects. They are questions about how we see and are seen.