Within embodied systems (we can dance)

Tension is proud to show the work of this year’s Tension Graduate Prize winner Amanda Moraes, a Brazilian-born, London-based artist and recent MA Fine Art graduate from Central Saint Martins.

Amanda’s practice explores how the body interacts with material and environment, often investigating themes of displacement, transformation, and spatial negotiation. Her work regularly expands beyond the gallery, incorporating workshop-based and curatorial projects that foster collective reflection and dialogue.

For her graduation show, Amanda installed a series of industrial ratchet straps stretched through the gallery space. These acted as temporary boundaries—reconfiguring how viewers navigated the environment and pushing toward a physical and conceptual recalibration of space. Subtle additions to the straps evoked internalized experience, as though language and thought were woven into the material itself. Her work draws on the politics of the body in space, creating a charged, reflective atmosphere that invites both movement and pause.