Amanda Nolan Booker is an artist based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She received her BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 2020. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally and is included in private collections worldwide.

I am interested in the relationship between memory and change. Using nostalgia as a vantage point, I draw on personal experiences for my paintings. Memories undergo alterations in a series of imperceptible shifts over time, contributing to a new perspective. My work considers the uncertain areas of these shifts, the tension between stillness and progression. The imagery I use serves as a catalyst for the subject matter, which remains unseen: feelings of presence, absence, lingering, longing, a sense of ephemerality, and residual impression. Recently, I have primarily referenced flowers and other plant life in my work. In addition to representing people and places of significance to me, they serve as a marker of passage, implying both celebration and mourning while signifying the idea of an eternal return through change.

Ultimately, I am seeking reconciliation between permanence and impermanence, operating along the boundary of recollection. Through these negotiations, moments of ambiguity emerge alongside those that seem almost like clarity. Working the surface of the paintings by excavating, layering, and wiping out is a kind of searching, one that is tied to the passing of time. Things become signified while being indistinct. They are obscured, altered, and retrieved — but not necessarily in that order.