IN CONVERSATION WITH AMY KOENIG
Amy
Koenig
Aphelion — South Florida → Bristol
On cosmic insignificance, horror film as creative fuel, and why the world needs your art — even on a random Tuesday at 11pm.
Photo-based Artist · UWE Masters
ninunina.com
Amy Koenig makes photographs about the abyss — not as a place of fear exactly, but as a place of reckoning. Born in South Florida and now based in Bristol where she's completing her Masters at UWE, she has been building a body of work called Aphelion — named for the point in an orbit when a planet is farthest from the sun. It is a project about space, scale, and the strangely peaceful feeling that comes from accepting how small we are.
She is also, it turns out, a serious horror enthusiast. These two things are not unrelated.
Greatest inspirations and influences?
Cinema. Specifically horror. There is something in those slow moments of suspension — the quiet before the jump scare, the tension that builds without release — that maps directly onto what I'm trying to do with a still image. The feeling of something arriving.
Lynch is a particular obsession. The ability to make an audience feel the right amount of unsettled — not terrified, not confused, but genuinely uneasy in a way they can't locate — that's what I'm chasing. Beyond cinema, the work draws directly from my own life, my own beliefs about existence and uncertainty. Aphelion is deeply personal.
How are technology and innovation affecting your work as a creative?
AI is the obvious pressure point right now. I'll be honest — I haven't gone deep into it myself, but I've watched what it's doing to the conversation around authorship and theft, and those are real concerns. A tool that helps artists is one thing. A system trained on work taken without consent is something else.
I stopped letting the metrics mean anything. Views, likes — they used to bother me. Now I post what I enjoy. If people connect with it, that's a real bonus. The other side is genuine: I've found incredible artists and real opportunities through being online that I would never have found otherwise.
"Thinking about our insignificance in relation to space and time is both terrifying and comforting."— Amy Koenig on Aphelion
Tell us about your creative process.
Strike while the iron is hot. That's me. Long stretches of not feeling it, then suddenly the urge arrives on a random Tuesday at 11pm — and you just go. Most of the time I make images as the ideas come.
Aphelion took about a year and a half. Some shots were completely spontaneous, others were meticulously pre-planned. But the constant across all of it is control. Staged, constructed images are my comfort zone. Having ownership over everything in the frame is where I feel most myself.
I've also been moving into video art recently. That's opened up something new — it's exciting in a way that feels like the beginning of a longer conversation with the medium. As for knowing when work is ready to share: I'm still figuring that one out.
What do you think of the art world?
Complex. Intimidating, if I'm being honest — even after making work for years and showing in a fair number of exhibitions, it still feels like I've barely touched the surface. The art world is not one thing. It shifts constantly, and it's completely different depending on where you are in the world.
What I'm most curious about is what it looks like in one year, five years, ten years. The trajectory feels genuinely open right now, which is either exciting or terrifying depending on the day.
What does wellbeing mean to you?
Stepping back. When things pile up or a project is burning me out, the most useful thing I can do is simply stop looking at it. Distance creates the fresh eyes that no amount of staring ever will.
The ordinary things matter: cooking something good, watching a film, being with people I care about. Decompression is not wasted time. It's the condition for better work later.
Bristol, England
Bristol, England · UWE Masters
in the
Void — and somehow everyone is just cool with it
Koenig's work doesn't chase answers. It sits with the questions — the enormity of space, the accident of existence, the strange comfort in realising none of us are the point. Her first solo show opens this spring. The world needs your art. Keep creating.
Website: www.amykoenigart.com
Instagram: www.instagram.com/amykoenigart
Courtesy of the artist
Courtesy of the artist