Get to Know Amanda Andrich
“There's always something new.
There is nothing that is impossible, I just have to find a way to make it happen.”
Amanda Andrich
Born and brought up in Australia, Amanda Andrich is a mixed media artist who draws inspiration from the everyday adventures of life, coming up with new art pieces, tastefully playing with whimsy and colours.
Amanda learned early in life that creativity can be channelled through different mediums as she saw her parents and her grandparents all be creative in their own ways. She spent most of her childhood watching her father tinker in the shed, building, and renovating houses, and painting awe-inspiring portraits, while her mom loved sewing.
Her grandfather was a boilermaker who loved tinkering in the shed too and her grandmother crocheted and knit. She regards these to be the formative experiences in her early childhood. She later went on to take an apprenticeship under her father to learn electrical work that now proves useful in the art pieces she creates.
Having a knack for art made her lean more towards art courses in school, where ceramics and woodworking piqued her interest. The classes opened new avenues and that facilitated learning and education about various mediums.
Along with the ceramics class at school, she started going to TAFE after school to take the ceramics class there. She has been practicing and learning different mediums since she was a teenager and has years of practice in many forms including folk art painting that she learnt from her aunt during her school days.
Having a European household meant that everything could be created or renovated, nothing had to be bought. She learned how you can use innovation and creativity to utilize all the raw material available and still produce something worthwhile and useful.
Her work has been hugely inspired by the idea of sustainability, not wasting any part of the material that you use to create art. She acknowledges how expensive it can be to find the right material in the art world and finds it much easier and resourceful to find the right components wherever inspiration strikes and utilize them fully- even going so far as changing her designs when she realises that some pieces don’t fit exactly how she wanted them to and would be wasted if she cuts a new one.
Drawing on inspiration from nature and her surroundings, often going for walks and finding metal or glass pieces that she upcycles to use within her work, or just strolling through the Australian bush land and getting inspired to recreate the visuals that arouse her interest- with lead lighting. She strongly believes in recycling glass and other materials to incorporate in her work to reduce waste in the environment.
Amanda’s work is about finding beauty in broken and damaged pieces and envisioning a better use for them. She also does restoration projects and puts her own spin on every piece that she restores.
Amanda’s lead lighting art pieces showcase her vivid imagination and her ability to bring that to life. They range from colourful Christmas ornaments to glass bowls, lamps, mirrors, and even bookmarks. All her designs are handmade-unique pieces that are exclusively sold through the website. Her vibrant leadlight suncatchers and other decorative wall pieces capture the vibrant flora and fauna that often inspire Amanda on her bush walks and treks.
You can say that Amanda's work aims to create art that can be used in households in an environmentally friendly way.
Some of Amanda’s artworks can be seen in person in her Cafe in Cooma. one of the current pieces is a glass church with a steeple, a globe leadlight built from repurposed glass, and a huge glass panel with horses. She feels particularly proud of the work because of its complexity and creativity.
“I do it because I love it. It is my passion. I want to keep producing craft and even teach people craft. It brings joy to me and to those I create it for.”
Amanda has years of hospitality experience across multiple countries, has had the opportunity to serve Prince Phillip and work with Gordon Ramsey, but has been passionate about art and has always worked on bringing her many ideas to life. She displays some of her art pieces in the cafe, but the entirety of her collection is exclusively available online for viewing and purchase. She keeps most of her art pieces in an affordable price range and has honed her skills with different mediums for decades now.
Her hospitality career took her all around Australia and even England and Scotland. During her stay on Christmas Island, she started teaching lead lighting and folk-art painting classes there. She has continued her love for teaching and takes lead lighting classes at her own residence now. She enjoys compartmentalizing her craft mediums and has allocated separate rooms for sewing and lead lighting, often spending over 12 hours a day just working on her art pieces.
Her current work with lead lighting was inspired by her mom who learned lead lighting as a hobby and taught Amanda how to do it. Amanda quickly took an interest in the medium and started playing around with it to develop her skills. She believes her work has come a long way since she first started.
One of Amanda’s current projects is an intricate panel of glass that is going to be highly detailed and will require at least 300 hours of work to complete. A masterpiece. She is also trying to teach herself to weld currently so she can make garden features through her inspired artistic flair.
