AMY GROSS
"We think we live within our physical scale and for the most part, we do. But everyone knows that it’s more complicated than that, that memory plays Alice with us, that our heads take the past and make projections from it. We take what we’ve seen and change it. We grow it, shrink it down, it multiplies, it changes color. We find something on a walk or in a book or on the internet, make it a metaphor, attach it to our lives. We’re told about something we haven’t actually seen and make up our own versions. Scale is irrelevant. We transform it all to fit into our heads.
I started recreating nature in my own image, to try to merge together what I could not see with what I could, to demonstrate how one thing transforms the other. Sewing and embellishing is a physical act of transformation, a merging or even an actual taking over of one material by another, an alteration by human thought process and experiences. It happens with time and leaves it’s own evidence. I’m fascinated and disturbed by symbiosis, whether it’s through thinking or illness or neglect, a strangler fig, errant cells, or mold. I make environments where everything represented is made out of something else - imitative materials: fabric, paper, applique, embroidery thread, paint, beads, oil pastel, and wax. I re-imagine the landscape and objects from nature, altered through my life and experiences of the human body. I mix anxieties and secrets, physical symptoms and the love and fear of being mortal with fabricated roots and leaves and pods and insects and blooms. I mimic the quickly changing natural world through man-made materials with a longer shelf life, an attempt, though illusory, to slow change, to consider and to hold on to life longer. Sometimes I like them framed, contained, externally well behaved, my own memento mori. After considering the surfaces and the sides and the cross-sections I’ve started making freestanding objects, organisms growing of their own accord, as though I had found them in the back of the closet, symptoms of neglect rediscovered, collected, organized and brought out to air. "
Amy Gross is a surface and textile designer by day, a painter and jewelry maker the rest of the time. Plus there's a dollhouse - “which I would work on all the time if I could, but then nothing would get done...”. Amy received her BFA from Cooper Union and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She currently lives and works in Florida with her cat, Solomon.