She lectured on the artwork of hard-edge abstract painter Frederick Hammersley at the New Mexico Museum of Art in relation to her own work, highlighting the use of “formal repetition, variation, and mutation within a system.”[7] Ellingson's work has been contextualized within the lineage of Cubism, by depicting multiple views of objects in one composition, and Abstract Expressionism, specifically related to the “environments” created by other AbEx artists such as Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, and Morris Louis.
[10][11][12] Ellingson uses the computer to create interrelated layers of repeating geometric forms which she replicates in increasing complexity using oil and encaustic paint; this “translation between the virtual and the real is paramount” for the artist.
[13] Her compositions are informed by the juxtaposition of opposites, such as the lightning speed of working digitally compared to the painstaking craft of layering paint by hand.
The piece covers a slightly curved wall with 60 different colors of tile and seven shades of grout, was made in collaboration with Montreal mosaic fabricators Mosaika, and is installed in SFO's expanded Terminal 3.
Her solo exhibitions include Amy Ellingson: Chopping Wood on the Astral Plane at Minnesota Street Project (October 1–29, 2016) and Iterations & Assertions at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art (June 7–September 13, 2014).