Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome Irish visual artist (and writer) Amber Cohen. We feature Skull Bride, a luminous creation in watercolor and ink with gold leaf on paper. This is an enigmatic and animated female figure, solidly inhabiting the uncanny valley, evoking both the computer-generated world of robots and AI and the organic world of roots and bones. She is objectified–her face and nude body made of panels which separate to reveal a green tangle of wires holding her together. In turn, she holds an object in her hand, a skull which seems to be sprouting and flowering. The confusion between what is organic and what is manufactured is fascinating and an excellent metaphor for today’s world, in which the latter is being grafted into the former, changing the essential nature of both. Where is humanity, headed and what form will life take in the not-so-distant future? Will AI become the new mother of life? Amber’s work is stunningly beautiful and entrancing, marked by intelligence and technical skill. It recalls H.R. Giger’s bio-mechanoids, but with a less-monstrous visage and vivid color, a feminine twist on male-dominated sci-fi culture. Amber turns the masochism and misogyny that often dominates that field into an affirmation of feminine creative power.
View Skull Bride in Synkroniciti’s “Vulnerable” issue, available for pre-order here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
My name is Amber Cohen. I am a painter and multidisciplinary artist based in Europe. I primarily work in ink, watercolor or technology. Born in Ireland, my practice serves as a medium for exploring the underlying patterns of human behavior and the unspoken or hidden experiences that are in our everyday lives. I draw inspiration from feminism, neurodiversity, cultural aesthetics, and otherness. In my creative process, each artwork is like unraveling a ball of twine, with every strand representing many intertwined ideas. Just as systems in real life function, nothing in my work can be isolated to a single idea; rather, it is an intersection of many.