Music

Amanda Church on the Record  

Nelson, BC tile painting artist featured on indy sensation Mogwai's album cover  

By Matt Goody  

Nelson, BC artist Amanda Church has garnered a lot of acclaim for her art since it was featured on the cover of Scottish indie-rock group Mogwai’s latest album Mr Beast. The Republic recently sat down with Church to discuss her rising career as an artist in the Kootenays, the Mogwai project, and upcoming ventures.

While originally from Vancouver and a graduate from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Church stumbled across the burgeoning arts community in the Kootenays. “I took the Greyhound across Canada, stopped in Nelson, fell in love with the town and decided when I was done school I would come back to live there. When I first landed in Nelson I tried being a production-type potter (hey, it's Nelson—it seemed like the thing to do!) but didn't really feel that was my forte. So I started painting on tiles.”

She adds that the environment was ideal for pursuing her interests “because the job situation is more limited in Nelson, and there are so many entrepreneurs, [and] it really fosters the mentality that you have to create your own work and not necessarily market it at home. People here are really passionate about what they do, their way of life, which is attractive to other people who feel that way about their own goals.” In an environment that doesn’t stress a nine-to-five existence, Nelson appears to be an ideal workshop for Church.

It was that ambition to market her work abroad that lead Church to pursue opportunities beyond typical gallery showings, like submitting her work to Mogwai’s representatives. The band responded by asking her to design the cover for their new album. The five-piece Glaswegian post-rock group has been a mainstay in indie rock, releasing several critically-acclaimed albums on the powerhouse label Matador.

Providing artwork for their next album offered a unique opportunity for Church to open up a new audience for her paintings. It was clear in our conversation that the band gave her complete freedom in producing the cover and their music facilitated the creative process: “[Mogwai] sent me a really rough demo CD, and let me work off it, no parameters. Which was great, because for communicating about the big nebulous things, words can sometimes be lacking.”

While quite humbled by all the attention she has received, she is also encouraged by all the positive feedback that has poured in from fans of her work on the record, spurring her on to future projects. Other Canadian artists have followed similar career trajectories and I wondered if Church saw herself as part of this movement.

Winnipeg artist Marcel Dzama has been embraced by the indie rock community and has been doing several album covers for the Weakerthans and Beck. I asked Church, with one album under her belt, if she saw herself pursuing more of these types of projects. With music having such an influence on her work, she responded that she “would be really happy to work with some Canadian bands like Wolf Parade, or some Vancouver bands like The Battles or Pink Mountaintops. But lots of times when I am working on a piece, I'll obsessively listen to one tune, because there is something so poignant and honest in it that reflects the [theme] of the new painting.”

Aside from her work with Mogwai, Church has several other projects on the go that reflect her eagerness to promote her work through several mediums. One project is entitled Alphabet, a graphic novel published by the New York publishing house George Braziller. There is also a second work entitled The Dogs of Mexico, which will be released soon.

Church has been offered a lot of support by the publishing house to pursue her interest with graphic novels. “Alphabet was my second attempt at creating a book. I had sent a previous manuscript to a really interesting New York house called George Braziller, who have been around for fifty years and are well renowned for doing very beautiful and non-commercial type books. Although they liked the first book, they couldn't make it fly, but their support and interest was enough encouragement for me to try again. So when I sent them Alphabet half done, they said sure . . . and that was that! I've been a huge fan of the graphic novel genre for some time now, and so my next book, The Dogs of Mexico, is more in line with that.”

Church also has a gallery show coming up in August that will provide an interesting survey of some of her new work for Vancouverites. The show opens August 3rd, 7:00pm at the Bjornson-Kajiwara Gallery at 1727 West 3rd Ave, and will run for two weeks. You can also find Alphabet at Sophia Books on Hastings St, and Mogwai’s Mr. Beast at various record stores. More information on Amanda Church’s work is available at amandachurch.ca