amy gross

Some of What I Choose to Hear, Embroidery Thread, Seed Beads, Digitally Printed Fabric, Oil Pastel, Felt, Suede, Paper, Trapunto, Applique, Sewn to Canvas, 20 x 20, Came Close to Drowning, Embroidery, Applique, Beading, Felt, Velvet, Suede, Oil on Canvas, 40 x 40, Optomist's Biotope (detail), Embroidery Thread, Ribbon, Yarn, Seed Beads, Digitally Printed Fabric, Polymer Clay, Paper, Trapunto, Applique, Sewn to Half Sphere, 8.5 x 24 x 13, Warbler's Biotope, Embroidery Thread, Ribbon, Yarn, Seed Beads, Digitally Printed Fabric, Polymer Clay, Paper, Trapunto, Applique, Sewn to Sphere, 5.5 x 6, Grown (detail), Embroidery Thread, Ribbon, Yarn, Seed Beads, Digitally Printed Fabric, Polymer Clay, Paper, Trapunto, Applique, Sewn to Sphere, 9 x 9

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 its 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.

get lost in the luscious details of these amazing pieces. read the entire statement here and more work here.