Oh. My. Word. This is the bizarre, beautiful and bedazzled work of American artist Amy Gross. I don’t even know where to start… the mushrooms, that hidden bird, the eyeballs!? I’m gonna pass this one over to Amy:
“My hand-embroidered and beaded fiber sculptures are my attempt to merge together the natural world and my own inner life. Their symbiosis suggests not only what can be seen, but also what cannot: the early alterations of time, the first suggestions of disintegration. I’ve always been attracted and frightened by things that are on the edge of spoiling, or straining to support an excess of growth. My elements seem to cluster, tangle, cling and multiply. They surpass some of the constrictions that my mind insists upon: my need to control excess, to categorize and label and keep things safe. They adapt to the environment they are placed into, like much of Florida life, and become hybrids in their desire to survive and thrive. And yet, paradoxically, their existence cannot help but be an exercise in human control – they 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. I use no found objects, nothing that was ever alive. All are constructed with craft store yarns and beads and wire and paper and fabric transfers made from altered scans and manipulated photographs. They’re still and silent proxies, fictions frozen in the midst of their suggested transformation. My organisms will not die. The natural world will alter, regardless of any attempts to prolong or preserve. 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. Stubbornly, I still need to hold things still, insist upon asserting my will, to make up things that tell a story of change, things that capture rushing ideas in a life that races by.”
Loooooooove.
