Amy McLean (b. 2004, Fife) graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2025 with a BA (Hons) in Painting. Recent recognition includes nominations for the New Blood Art Emerging Art Prize and the Clason-Harvie Bursary (2025). She will undertake a residency at Fish Factory, Stöðvarfjörður, Iceland in April 2026.
Her work explores visual coincidence, perceptual recall and the human impulse to connect disparate forms. By bringing together historical, found and personal imagery, she examines how memory, cultural context and cognitive bias shape perception. Selective attention, pareidolia and frequency illusions function as both tools and themes, layering meaning in ways that reflect the abundance - and overload - of contemporary image culture.
Rather than resolving meaning, her work invites viewers to dwell in ambiguity, questioning whether perceived connections are accidental or constructed. She proposes an open system of interpretation, where imagery behaves like thought: fluid, associative and unstable, and where meaning emerges through sustained attention rather than immediate clarity.
In a world of overstimulation and algorithmic influence, her work offers a curated chaos - an entangled visual space in which even the smallest detail may reveal a broader map of our own perception.
