Cast aluminium, 130 x 225 x 16 cm
"Amulet" was made especially for the exhibition HIRAETH. HIRAETH is an untranslatable Welsh word for home and the longing for it. Dawny Tootes sums up this feeling with "Amulet", which shows the silhouette of a bush in winter: "At the moment I live in a caravan in a field (...) and nowhere else have I felt so at home as here in the rural environment with wild animals and plants and an endless sky. Wild and tall hedges border my field, and I draw my inspiration from their twisted and torn silhouettes.”

Dawny Tootes (Sonya Dawn Flewitt, *1967 in Neston, England) is a freelance artist who has lived and worked in Pembrokeshire, Wales since 2002. She prefers cast works with molten metal, where she has to work quickly and intuitively, as the metal begins to solidify as soon as it leaves the kiln. It is therefore difficult to control. Dawny Tootes has developed a casting technique in which she investigates the melting of metal as an independent free-forming process.

She regards the intense heat, the roar of the furnace as an "absolutely captivating experience" in her work, which oscillates between abstract, figurative and plant forms. By frequently using recycled metals, she creatively processes the topic of sustainability in an emotional and ecological context.