Bio:

Amy Gross was born in Long Island, New York, and received her BFA from the Cooper Union in New York City. After a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, she started a graphic design company and worked as a surface designer, specializing in textiles, children’s products, and toy design. In 2000, she moved to South Florida, and fascinated by the subtropical environment and the intricate natural growth there, began making hand-beaded jewelry. Her work expanded to embroidered canvases, then to sculpture, merging observed natural elements with invented life forms. In 2006, Gross received a grant from the South Florida Cultural Consortium, and an Artist Innovation Fellowship in 2020. Her mixed media sculpture is represented by Momentum Gallery in Asheville, NC. Selected exhibits include the Craft and Folk Art Museum of Los Angeles, The Minnesota Museum of Art, the Mesa Contemporary Art Museum, the Boca Raton Museum of Art, and fairs Art Wynwood and SOFA. Her shadowboxes are part of the permanent collection of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and, as part of the Art in Embassies program, will be installed in the new American Embassy in Papua New Guinea. Her work has appeared in Fiber Arts Magazine, American Craft Magazine, The Washington Post, Luxe Magazine, and the art and culture blogs Colossal and TreeHugger. She was featured in an article in the Spring 2016 issue of Fiber Art Now Magazine, and was the issue’s cover artist. She appears in two Schiffer Press books, Artistry in Fiber, Sculpture, and Dimensional Cloth, Sculpture by Contemporary Textile Artists. She lives and works in Delray Beach, Florida.

Statement:

My embroidered and beaded fiber sculptures merge together the natural world and my own inner life. They suggest not only what can be seen, but also what cannot: the early alterations of time, the first suggestions of disintegration. Like so much of Florida life, my elements cluster, tangle, hybridize, and multiply, adapting to the environments they are placed into. Yet, paradoxically, they’re the result of human intention - completely unnatural. I never collaborate with the nature that fascinates me. I use no found objects, nothing that was ever alive. All are constructed from synthetic yarns, beads, wire, paper, and fabric - still and silent fictions frozen in the midst of their suggested transformation. Because of quarantine and isolation, the inventions of the inner life have become more influential than the outer world – the sculptures feel more like memory merged with images that I allow to filter in from the outside. They do not actually change and they do not grow, but they allow me to hold on to who I am and who I was, what I loved, and what fascinated and frightened me, in a time that moved so fast it blurred.

www.amygross.com
@amyla174