AMY USDIN
-Amy, we look forward to getting to know you and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
I began experimenting with fiber art as a teen in the 1970s, fascinated by the work of the now-iconic artists redefining the field, among them Shelia Hicks. Fear and lack of resources in the pre-internet Midwest made me discount a career as a fine artist. Instead, I studied graphic communications, becoming an art director before retiring early to invest more time in family.
A few years ago, I had the unexpected opportunity to see Hicks’ Lifelines retrospective — the first fiber exhibition I’d ever seen and the first time I’d thought about fiber art in decades — and felt an immediate connection.
Back home, I rediscovered a vintage horse fly net I’d purchased years earlier for its tactile appeal. At the time, I didn’t understand its function — keeping flies off horses — and I certainly didn’t see it kickstarting an artistic practice. But without easy access to any equipment, I found that its structure of horizontal ropes made tempting warp for the few spools of waxed linen I had laying around to serve as weft.
So I just began. It was intuitive, using muscle memory. At the time, I’d been caring for a father in declining health. In that, I felt an abstract correlation to the careful tending of an aged object. And I found that working on the vintage fly net, recalling the years spent weaving in my parents’ basement and the oversized memory of sporadic childhood trail rides, made me nostalgic. The slow process of weaving within and across its fixed borders allowed me space to begin to process the layers of my own history.
Autobiographic meditation has evolved into work that more broadly speaks to histories, loss, and longing. Increasingly, I think about the duality of nets and the sometimes-blurred boundaries between protection and entrapment, questioning the meaning of objects and our own conceptions of security.
-What makes your process unique?
Aging nets, particularly horse fly nets, provide unlikely structures on which to weave. Their ropes are spaced farther apart than ideal, and they break at whim. Due to their fixed, sectioned warp, every part I weave affects the next, often unpredictably as I try to coax them into three-dimensional forms. These challenges make the process both rewarding and frustrating. Though I begin each piece with a specific memory or association evoked by the individual net, whether by its previous life or its worn characteristics, the materials often redirect me.
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-As artists, we have all gone through waves of creative blocks. How have they appeared for you, and how have you moved past them?
My creative block, though I didn’t recognize it as such, lasted 40 years until the Hicks exhibit shook me back to my roots. My work has little to do with hers visually but she represents my formative weaving years, the last time I remember creating freely, for myself. Since starting my current practice, I’ve definitely had missteps – I’ve done plenty of deconstructing and have briefly set work aside – but so far, each piece has led to another. Because my process takes so long, with each sculpture morphing many times from beginning to end, I have ample time to ponder new ideas and directions.