Amy McLean

About

At the heart of Seeing Double is an exploration of visual coincidence, perceptual recall, and the human impulse to notice and connect disparate forms. This body of work brings together seemingly unrelated media—19th- century collages with Shaun of the Dead, Celtic FC with rhizomatic forms—to examine how memory, cultural context, and cognitive bias shape relational perception.

What began as formal pairings—the tilt of tattooed wrestlers echoing a French ruin—quickly revealed deeper layers of association: phonetic echoes, symbolic parallels, and philosophical inquiries into our systems of categorization, connection, causation, and ultimately the interconnectedness of all things. Drawing on Heraclitus’ unity of opposites and Deleuzian rhizomes, the work resists linear narrative in favor of relational thinking, where meaning arises through adjacency, recurrence, and slippage.

Repetition becomes both method and subject. Legs recur, grids repeat, motifs reverberate across canvases. Muybridge’s motion studies, 19th-century photography, tattoo culture, and cinematic imagery shape the work’s visual lexicon. At times, the paintings’ split plane echo the infinite scroll of digital media or the measured cadence of a film strip, traces of the shifting ways we capture, compose, and carry images through time.

By merging historical and personal imagery, the work highlights the neurological and emotional structures that govern visual processing. Selective attention, pareidolia, and frequency illusions become tools as well as themes, layering meaning in ways that reflect the abundance—and overload—of contemporary image culture.

Rather than resolve meaning, the paintings invite viewers to linger in ambiguity, questioning whether connections are accidental or constructed. Seeing Double proposes an open system of interpretation— where imagery behaves like thought, fluid and associative, and where meaning unfolds through sustained attention.

In a world of overstimulation and algorithmic suggestion, this series offers a curated chaos—an entangled space where even the smallest detail might unlock our view to a larger map of perception.