Amanda Aileen Fisher works across text, structure, and voice to reveal how form shapes perception. Her practice treats form not as neutral container, but as a collaborator—one that guides, limits, and transforms the meaning of what we create and how we experience it.

Artist Statement

As a writer and artist, I am constantly navigating the space between form and content. My work begins with a question: What do the structures we create say about what we value?

Often, content is privileged over form. We’re trained to look for meaning in the words themselves—but form is not neutral. Form holds, directs, limits, invites. It tells the reader, the viewer, the participant how to engage. It’s the container that gives context to meaning, shaping not only what is communicated, but how it’s received.

In my work, form is both medium and message.
Sometimes it is the whole point.

I create book structures that bend time, disorient sequence, and make space for nonlinear thought. I design writing experiences where the body becomes part of the sentence. I build events and installations where language is not just something read, but something lived through—as sound, as gesture, as collective atmosphere.

In this way, content is not isolated from the structure that delivers it. The relationship between the two becomes the work itself. My practice asks:

  • What does this form allow?

  • What does it restrict?

  • How does it shape the way we interpret what’s inside?

Whether I’m working in writing, publishing, installation, or facilitation, I return to this inquiry. I treat form as a collaborator—something alive, something that speaks.

A Reflection on Form (Original Writing)

The following piece was written as a conceptual meditation on the relationship between structure and meaning. It functions not just as explanation, but as an embodiment of the ideas it describes.

Form = Content.

Form = Content.

On Form & Content

What my art training drilled into me was the marriage of form and content and that those two should not and really cannot be divorced. This is the lesson my artist self gives daily to my writer self. Words and language and stories and the communication of things do not just belong between the pages of a book. The book is just another box to think outside of.

My artist makes my writer look at the content of what I am trying to say and search for the right form in which to say it.

So here is my artist statement my writer wrote:

Form is always a choice, not a given.

It is something to be thought about, decided.

It supports the content, the thing it holds, what is inside.

This makes it a container.

The container is also the content.

The container is the solid form for what is fluid inside it. They are one and the same – one simply a shell for the other, just as your skin holds what is inside your body. It is the right form for your content, and you couldn’t walk around without it.

This concept is present in everything I do, in everything I make, every form consciously chosen to support what is inside.

I made my books handmade on purpose. Because the form communicates another layer: the power of the self to make things, the autonomy we each have to bring what is inside us into physical being, and that you don’t need anyone else to do that, to give permission, to hand you a pre-approved container for your creativity. If I took those books to a publisher and had them mass printed, you wouldn’t get it. The message would be lost. The message wouldn’t even exist anymore. The words inside would be there, yes, but one of the most important layers would be stripped off. The body without its skin is not really a body. The cupcake without the frosting is just a breakfast muffin.

So I chose my form intentionally. I choose it every time.

I am asking you to choose your forms intentionally. To pay attention to them.

All of my work is a dialogue, whether or not you and I ever speak.

I am always posing a question that I hope you will consider and eventually answer. And it’s really none of my business what your answer is. The fact you’re thinking about it is what I care about. My “job” (the one I have assigned myself, or the one my unique set of abilities has assigned me and that I have accepted) is to make your mind get up and move.

Did I just do it?

For a broader view of Amanda’s practice and current work, visit the About page.