Amy Lay-Pettifer: Writer, Curator, and Communications Manager
Amy Lay-Pettifer is a dynamic figure in the London art scene, working across the roles of Writer, Curator, and Communications Manager. Her professional expertise covers writing, curating, and production, often focusing on site-specific and collaborative projects. Holding an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths College, she is intellectually committed to exploring how voices, bodies, and objects connect through time, particularly as language becomes a ritual.
Since 2014, her professional career has included serving as Studio Manager/Communications Manager for a leading contemporary British artist, a senior role involving the management of artwork production, exhibitions, press, catalogues, and archives. Demonstrating her curatorial reach, she was a guest curator for Fermynwoods Contemporary Art's 2020/21 programme, which included co-founding SHELL LIKE, a platform for experimental writing and sound works.
Text for Aleph Contemporary: Portable Portals
Lay-Pettifer's incisive critical voice was highlighted by her text for Aleph Contemporary's exhibition, Rita Evans: Portable Portals (November 2021 – June 2022).
In her essay, she powerfully frames Evans's drawings in the context of contemporary instability—a reality she describes as having a sense of "jelly" or "slippage". She suggests that the seismic global events of the time created an "intensified interior landscape," turning the domestic world into a site for "malleable, transformative encounters."
Lay-Pettifer analyses how Evans's use of colour and shape distills bodies, objects, and spaces into a "common visual language" that has the potential for "movement that is fluid—queasy but full of juice." Ultimately, the drawings are presented as "Portable Portals" because they map the deep human desire for communication and physical touch, offering "blueprints for its expansion beyond limits." This text is a signature example of her ability to connect the abstract formal qualities of painting with profound emotional and theoretical concerns.