New Zealand visual artist and poetry enthusiast Amy Woodside, based in New York, creates typographical prints accompanied beside lyrical renditions of love, life, the present, the future and everything else that exists between the real and the imaginary. Her abstract silkscreens of repeated wordplays and compressed letterforms do, if I recall on my high school visual art class ‘colour symbolism’ teachings, generate different associations based on the colours they associate with. Woodside’s mixed media reminds me of everything American; from the USA flag, to the Pop Art movement in New York, to the superhero colours of The Flash and Superman...

“It’s not simply the aesthetics we’re drawn to either, her understanding of language comes to bear on each of her pieces, either through visual wordplay or the use of letterforms as icons to communicate her message.” - Its Nice That.

Woodside was one of 100 artists featured in the project, “CNNCTD+100”, at the New Museum, alongside greats Yoko Ono, Cindy Sherman and Pharrell Williams. Her website is not only both carefully curated, but striking and playful. Below is an extract from Amy Woodside’s writing, “Love Letter from Outer Space”.

“If you were here I would tell you all of this.
I would show you how the stars are not
the wet diamonds you think they are.
They are not fashionably geometric
or sharp blocks of hissing ice

but soft shaped flowers
like pale thighs blooming,
they are velvet skinned with lavender flesh
and make small sighs that softly
ripple the surface of the milky way,
they are where flexible limbs
and secrets are born, they speak
the language of mothers.”

Check out the rest of her work here.