Amanda McCauley

My work explores the space between observation and invention, using foraged seaweeds,  flowers, leaves, and other ephemeral materials to create imagined forms that exist somewhere between land and sea, reality and memory.

Working across photography, collage, and preserved botanicals, I construct temporary worlds from materials gathered along coastlines, forests, and gardens. Seaweeds become petals, roots become nervous systems, and flowers dissolve into creatures that seem both familiar and unknown. The “SeaFlora” series begins as physical arrangements foraged and assembled by hand before being photographed in a water tank and printed in large formats. Each archival print is then transformed through collage, with preserved natural materials incorporated into the work.

Drawn to the meeting place of land and sea, I combine materials that would rarely coexist in nature to create hybrid forms that blur distinctions between terrestrial and marine life. My processes in preserving and shaping “wet” materials from the ocean and “dried” materials from the land are entirely opposite. I am interested in the similarities and differences across plant forms.

I am fascinated by the ways natural materials can be transformed into images that feel simultaneously discovered and invented. By reassembling fragments of the natural world into new visual languages, I invite viewers to consider nature not as a fixed system, but as something fluid, evolving, and endlessly capable of reinvention.