Amy Gross

My pieces are my attempt to merge the natural observable world with my own inner life- I’m trying to remake nature sieved through my experiences. I’ve always been attracted and frightened by things that are in their fullest bloom but on the verge of spoiling. There’s beauty and sadness in them, heightened by the undeniable inevitability of their ending in death. This fascination and fear describes my own psychology more than I would like to admit. The process forces me to look at and think about what I would rather not – the heedlessness of time, of aging, of the stealthy undermining of illness. I began my fiber work at a time when the people closest to me were being diagnosed with illnesses we had, up until then, known little about, that had very few symptoms or signs – we had to process stories being told to us that changed the surface of everything we knew. It was an undermining by the invisible. The elements involved had no scale, the microscopic suddenly becoming, in my mind, as large as my hand. The information was its own form of symbiote, it stitched and wound its way into everything I saw and thought about. I needed to make the invisible real. I started mining nature, finding elements in it that paralleled my private world, of life merging into life, manipulating, altering each other completely. My elements mimic both the microscopic and life forms in our human eye-scale. They grow, they take over, they climb. The only rule is that my living things are not corporeal, they’re imitation, they cannot die. They diagram stages of decay and change, they don’t demonstrate them. It’s a fantasy of human control, impossible, but somehow necessary. My making these objects doesn’t fix things, it doesn’t stop time, but it holds things still, in place, for a little while.