My work examines the domestic sphere as a site where intimacy, labor, and instability converge. Working across photography, video, sculpture, and performance, I use materials drawn from the home—bread dough, furniture, textiles, discarded belongings—to trace how private spaces absorb broader social, economic, and political pressures. The domestic interior, often framed as a place of care and stability, becomes in my work a fragile structure shaped by migration, precarity, gendered labor, and time.

Bread dough recurs throughout my practice as both material and metaphor. Rooted in my upbringing in an Italian immigrant household in Australia, dough carries associations of nourishment, care, and tradition, but also excess, repetition, and exhaustion. As a time-based, unstable substance, it resists permanence. I use its processes of rising, cracking, and collapse to mirror cycles of formation and disintegration—of bodies, homes, and systems under strain. Influenced by Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject, I approach dough and other domestic materials as substances that trouble boundaries between self and object, care and decay, control and loss.

Recent projects extend this inquiry toward questions of inheritance, aging, and economic displacement. In works that document domestic objects left behind by people relocating due to rising costs of living, or items preserved within my family home as my mother ages, I consider material culture as a quiet archive of lived experience. These objects hold memory not through monumentality, but through accumulation, neglect, and refusal to be discarded. Photography functions here as a ritual of attention—an act of holding and witnessing what is otherwise destined to disappear.

Across my practice, the home is not presented as a stable refuge but as a contested, permeable space where social expectations, care work, and structural fragility intersect. By foregrounding slow processes, precarious balances, and material transformation, my work asks how contemporary life is lived within systems that promise security yet continually erode it. I am interested in the tension between preservation and collapse, and in how domestic materials—humble, bodily, and familiar—can make visible the quiet violence and resilience embedded in everyday life.

Santina Amato (b. Melbourne, Australia; based in the U.S. since 2010) creates multidisciplinary work spanning sculpture, video, photography, installation, and performance. Her practice explores the female experience and personal identity through domestic materials such as bread dough, used bedsheets, and discarded furniture—reimagining the home as a charged site of resilience, constraint, and transformation. Rooted in her upbringing in a traditional Italian immigrant household, Amato uses these visceral materials to reflect on the emotional labor and complexity of navigating life outside conventional expectations, challenging entrenched narratives of the female body and domesticity.

Amato holds an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was a 2022 AIM Fellow at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. In 2025, she curated Thresholds: Reimagining Domesticity, Labor, and Identity at PS122 Gallery, New York, while also presenting new work at AIR Gallery’s 16th Biennale I Woke Up Dreaming, curated by Patricia Margarita Hernández, and completing a residency at Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. In 2024, she exhibited and performed in the Sixth AIM Biennale at the Bronx Museum, served as a panelist for the New York State Council on the Arts, and was the inaugural artist in residence at 1708 Gallery’s Pilot Program in

Richmond, VA. She has received major support from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Queens Arts Fund, the City of Chicago’s DCASE, the Illinois Arts Council Agency, the Mayer Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.

Her work has been exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Intersect Arts Center (MO), AIR Gallery (NY), Westbeth Gallery, Field Projects, Spring Break Art Show, Here Arts Center, Governors Island Art Fair (NYC), the Samek Art Museum at Bucknell University (PA), the Arts Club of Chicago (IL), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson (AZ). In 2018, she was named a Hot Pick Artist by Smack Mellon, Brooklyn. Her work is held in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, The Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection, the Victorian College of the Arts (Melbourne), and the Samek Art Museum (PA). Her practice has been featured in publications including Lenscratch, Create! Magazine, Emergency Index, Chicago Artist Writers, Not Real Art, and Psychology Tomorrow.