MAGICAL MIX OF NATURAL & INNER WORLDS: AMY GROSS
AMY GROSS
A magnificent mix of natural world and inner world reference inspires fine fiber artist Amy Gross. Her hand embellished mixed media fiber sculptures, vivariums, and shadow boxes are an extraordinary fusion of fantasy and realism, redolent of both disintegration and new growth.
Working with an amalgam of fine craft yarns, fabric, embroidery, beading, painting, manipulated photographs, paper, wire, polymer, pins, and other craft materials, Gross creates magical microcosms.
Gross calls her pieces “biotopes,” referencing a word first coined by artist/zoologist Ernst Haeckel, which describes an area where specific living things gather and grow -- where life forms coexist, compete, cluster, tangle, mix, and merge. “They blend and influence and fight for space, very much the way we all do in our daily lives,” Gross explains.
“To me, biotopes are the physical morphing of things and ideas, both the forest beyond your door and the dreams you have about it. They are microcosms, reflecting larger places and ideas in a condensed, small space.”
Using fiber, beads, paper and wire, Gross mimics the biological world, and at the same time, elevates it. Thread and yarn twist into roots, fabric is fashioned into skin (animal and leaf), and beads become berries and red blood cells.
“I merge what can be seen with the naked eye with the invisible life forms we can only see through microscope lenses, because in the mind’s eye scale no longer matters. Spores and viruses resemble seed pods and corals, cilia waves like fields of grass.”
While they resemble wild, tangled, organic nature, Gross’ works are completely unnatural. “I do not collaborate with the nature that fascinates me, the myriad visible and invisible interactions that lie at the heart of every insect, bacteria, tree and spore. I collaborate with manufacturing.”
Gross collects natural objects, such bits of moss, leaves, twigs, and berries, but uses them only for inspiration and reference. She does not use any found objects or formerly living materials in her sculpture. “My organisms will not die,” Gross reminds us. “I know that my making these objects will not slow or stop the clock, perhaps they only clutter the environment with my very human need to turn thoughts into objects.”
While not alive, the sculptures are bursting with life. They are complex, like natural lifeforms are, as every square inch is either encrusted with beads, embellished with stitching, or painted.
“I love the small and the overlooked... I love the process of looking close, of finding things underfoot that fast times force you to miss. And I love the illusion of stopping time, of making a leaf or a mushroom or bird that will last much longer than the eye-blink that nature allows them.”
The mix of materials echos the mix of perception and experience, both of artist and of viewer. “There is no passive looking, everything we observe is colored and influenced by our experiences, the where and how and why that have made up our pasts,” Gross explains. “A walk through a backyard or the woods is a journey that differs for each of us. We weave our individual stories into everything we see and hear and smell and touch.”
Gross studied at the Skohegan School of Painting & Sculpture and received a BFA, majoring in painting and graphic design at the prestigious Cooper Union Institute in New York.
Gross has been published in Fibers Magazine and Visual Overtures Magazine and has been invited to contribute to a new Lark Books publication, “Design Inspiration Guide: Plants.”
Amy Gross resides and works in Delray Beach, FL.
Gross is represented by Momentum Gallery, Asheville, North Carolina and Watson MacRae Gallery, Sanibel, Florida
For more information about Amy Gross mixed media biotope sculptures, vivariums, and shadow boxes, visit her website.
Read more about Magnificent Mix all this week on BeautifulNow. See Marvelous Mixed-up Landscape, Chartreuse: A Magical Mix, Mushrooms are Saving Bees & Us!, and check out more beautiful things happening now in BN Wellness, Impact, Nature/Science, Food, Arts/Design, and Travel, Daily Fix posts.
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