Amy Rusch

Notes

Amy Rusch (b.1990) is an artist working across disciplines and mediums. She’s been exploring a vibrational expression of mark-making, using stitched thread into layers of found plastic bags. The layers of plastic, connected by the motion and soundscape produced by the machine, communicate aural and material aspects of our modern culture. The threads are an attempt to link and comprehend millions of years of layered stratigraphic time.

Her current body of work is informed by ocean crossings, archaeological excavations and microscopic studies of the living world. Her practice can be seen as tracings, translations or mappings of sensory lived – body experiences, becoming multisensory coalescences of sound, vibration, line and colour.

“This piece does not have a specific orientation. Like a map, it can be turned in any cardinal direction. In its making, it was in continual movement. The needle of the sewing machine, as with a compass needle, provided the fixed point around which the piece moved and shifted according to position or perspective.
Its shape is directly linked to the found plastic bags and initial free-form stitched contour lines that bind the plastic together. These first markings were made in 2022, with my eyes closed, or looking ahead, thinking about what it means to have sight as a degenerating sense. This under-map of stitched lines forms the guide toward which I returned, this year, completing the piece. Stitching through plastic bags draws to the surface, thread colours from beneath. The pointillist combinations of colour are a visual pattern of connections made through the layers of plastic in between. The colours of the plastic and thread extend with emanations of their own frequency and wavelength. Colour frequency and resonance energetically hold visible and invisible together.” - Amy Rusch