My work examines the domestic sphere as a site where intimacy, labour, and instability converge. Working across photography, video, sculpture, and performance, I use materials drawn from the home — bread dough, furniture, textiles, clothing, and discarded belongings — to investigate how private spaces absorb broader social, economic, and political pressures. Often imagined as a place of comfort and stability, the home emerges in my practice as a fragile and continually shifting structure shaped by migration, economic precarity, gendered labour, and the passage of time.

Bread dough has long been central to my practice, both as material and metaphor. Rooted in my upbringing in an Italian immigrant household in Australia, dough carries the embodied knowledge of generations of women whose labour has sustained domestic life. It speaks to nourishment, care, and cultural inheritance, but also to repetition, exhaustion, and the expectations placed upon women’s bodies. As an unstable, time-based material, dough resists permanence, expanding, cracking, collapsing, and changing in ways that cannot be entirely controlled. Influenced by Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject, I use these material processes to trouble the boundaries between body and object, care and decay, preservation and loss.

My recent return to my family home in Australia to care for my ageing mother has brought these longstanding investigations into a more immediate and lived relationship with the domestic environment. I have chosen to reorient my life around this time with her, recognising the privilege of sharing in her everyday existence while navigating the physical and emotional demands of caregiving. The rhythms of our days are shaped by acts of care and maintenance, alongside moments of pleasure, independence, and continuity. My mother still dances in the morning sunlight and tends the vegetable garden she has cultivated for more than five decades. Its seasonal produce becomes the ingredients for the meals I now prepare for her, extending a cycle of nourishment and labour that has shaped our family across generations.

Within this environment, I have become increasingly attentive to the material histories accumulated throughout the house. Tablecloths, sheets, doilies, clothing, crockery, and everyday objects bear the traces of bodies, gestures, and routines repeated over decades. These belongings are not simply repositories of memory or relics of a disappearing past. Many remain in use, continuing to participate in the life of the home. Others offer possibilities for dismantling, reconstruction, and transformation. I am interested in the tension between preserving these objects and allowing them to take on new forms, and in how material transformation might carry forward something of the lives and labour embedded within them.

This evolving relationship with the family home has also prompted me to reconsider the boundaries between artistic practice and everyday life. The knowledge my mother has passed to me through her hands — through cooking, growing food, and the countless gestures involved in maintaining a household — continues to inform how I understand material, repetition, and making. As our roles shift, the acts of caring, preparing food, handling objects, and sustaining daily routines have become inseparable from the questions that drive my work. Rather than approaching my mother’s ageing as something to document directly, I am drawn to the materials, relationships, and exchanges through which our lives continue to be negotiated.

Alongside these intimate investigations, my practice considers the broader conditions of domestic instability and displacement. Objects abandoned by those forced from their homes through economic pressures, belongings left behind after death, and possessions accumulated within my own family home reveal how material things register the consequences of social change. Through photography and sculptural intervention, I examine the uneasy relationship between attachment and dispossession, and the ways ordinary objects can embody both personal histories and larger structures of inequality.

Ultimately, I approach the home neither as a sanctuary nor solely as a site of confinement, but as a place of ongoing negotiation, where care and exhaustion, intimacy and resistance, continuity and change coexist. Through the transformation of familiar materials and the repetition of everyday gestures, my work considers what we inherit, what we preserve, what we relinquish, and how meaning continues to be made through the fragile, often invisible labour of sustaining life.

Santina Amato (b. Melbourne, Australia) is an interdisciplinary artist who has divided her time between New York, USA, and Melbourne, Australia, since 2010. Working across sculpture, photography, video, installation and performance, her practice examines the female experience through the intersections of domesticity, gendered labour, migration, memory and personal identity. Rooted in her upbringing in a traditional Italian immigrant household, Amato transforms everyday materials—including bread dough, used bedsheets, discarded furniture and domestic objects—into visceral explorations of the body and its relationship to the spaces it inhabits. Her work reimagines the home as a site of intimacy, resilience, constraint and transformation, challenging entrenched narratives surrounding femininity, care and the expectations placed upon women’s bodies and labour.

Amato holds an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA (2017), and a BFA (Honours) from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, Australia. Her work has been presented at institutions including the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, USA; Samek Art Museum at Bucknell University, Pennsylvania, USA, where she presented the solo exhibition Convulsive Beauty (2021), curated by Lisa Freiman; Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, Arizona, USA; New York Botanical Garden, New York, USA; Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, Australia; Arts Club of Chicago, USA; and Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, China.

Recent exhibitions include I Woke Up Dreaming, the 16th A.I.R. Biennial, curated by Patricia Margarita Hernández, A.I.R. Gallery, New York, USA (2025); Bronx Calling: The Sixth AIM Biennial, Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, USA (2024); and The Unbearable Weight of Expectations, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York, USA (2023). In 2025, Amato curated Thresholds: Reimagining Domesticity, Labor, and Identity at PS122 Gallery, New York, USA, where she also presented new performance work. In 2024, she served as a panelist for the New York State Council on the Arts.

Amato’s practice has received substantial financial support through competitive grants, fellowships, commissions and institutional awards. She was a 2022 AIM Fellow at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and has received the New York State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Grant (2023), Queens Arts Fund New Work Grants (2023, 2026), Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant (2023), Mayer Foundation Grant (2022), Australia Council for the Arts New Work Early Career Grant (2012), and the American Australian Association’s Dame Joan Sutherland Fund Project Grant (2014). Additional support has been awarded by the Illinois Arts Council Agency and the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events.

Her artist residencies include the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, New York, USA (2025); 1708 Gallery, Richmond, USA (2024), where she was the inaugural artist in its pilot residency program; Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, Arizona, USA (2019); MASS MoCA, Massachusetts, USA (2018); and BRIC Arts Media, New York, USA (2014). She has been selected for a forthcoming 2027 artist residency at the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, Maine, USA. In 2018, she was recognised as a Hot Pick Artist by Smack Mellon, New York, USA.

Her work is held in institutional collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, USA; Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA; Samek Art Museum, Pennsylvania, USA; and Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, Australia. Her practice has been featured in publications including Lenscratch, Create! Magazine, Emergency Index, Chicago Artist Writers, Not Real Art, Psychology Tomorrow and Performance Art: Education and Practice (Routledge, 2023).

2026

New Work Grant, Queens Arts Fund, NY, USA

2025

Artist-in-Residence, Saltonstall, New York, USA

2024

Artist-in-Residence, 1708 Gallery, Richmond, Virginia, USA

2023

Emergency Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, USA

Individual Artist Grant, New York State Council on the Arts, NY, USA

New Work Grant, Queens Arts Fund, NY, USA

Mentor, Immigrant Artist Program, New York Foundation for the Arts, NYC, USA

2022

AIM Fellow, Bronx Museum of Art, NYC, USA 

Grant, The Mayer Foundation, NYC, USA

Commission, New York Botanical Gardens, NYC, USA

Artist-in-Residence, 4 Heads Portal, Governors Island, NYC, USA

2021

Artist-in-Residence, 4 Heads Portal, Governors Island, NYC, USA

2020 

Artist-in-Residence, Bethany Arts Community, Ossining, NY, USA

2019 

Grant, Professional Development, Illinois Arts Council Agency (IACA)

Grant, Individual Artists Program (IAP), City of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events (DCASE)

Artist-in-Residence, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, AZ, USA

2018

Hot Pick Artist, Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY, USA

Artist-in-Residence, Process Park, Artslant & Chashama, Pine Plains, NY, USA

Artist-in-Residence, Crosstown Arts Center, Memphis, TN, USA

Artist-in-Residence, MASS MOCA, North Adams, MA, USA

Grant, Illinois Arts Council Agency (IACA) Individual Artist Support Project Grant

Grant, Individual Artists Program (IAP), City of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events (DCASE)

2017 

Artist-in-Residence, Field/Work (2017/2018), Chicago Artist Coalition (CAC), Chicago, USA

Artist-in-Residence, ACRE (Artists' Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions), Steuben, WI, USA

Writing Fellow, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA

2016 

Honorable Mention Award, ExFest 2016 Film/Video Festival, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA

Angela & George Paterakis Scholarship, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA

Writing Fellow, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA

2015 

Leroy Neiman Scholarship, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA

Travel Grant, Ian Potter Cultural Trust Fund, Melbourne, Australia

Artist-in-Residence, Summer Artist Institute, LMCC/ Creative Capital, New York, USA