email: amy@amysimons.com
artist CV: here
ARTIST BIO
Amy Simons is an artist based in Bellingham, Washington. She holds a BFA in ceramics from the University of Washington and an MFA in printmaking from Arizona State University. Her foundational training in ceramics and textiles shapes her approach to constructing work through form and surface. She is drawn to printmaking for its qualities of surprise and reversal, and the medium's ability to open new pathways or habits of thought. Working across these mediums, she explores how we organize ourselves and what patterns we create intentionally, subconsciously, by luck, or by mistake.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My most recent works are woodcut collages—woodcut prints because from each whole comes many parts, and collages because those parts together become another whole. By printing on both sides of transparent paper, different relationships are illuminated in changing light. Monumental but weightless, the shapes breathe and sway in response to your presence, impacted without direct contact.
Contrasting with the colossal, details in each print invite closer attention, focusing care for individuals within the flock. They are shape shifters like us, navigating roles simultaneously as individuals and parts of collectives. Each print comes from the same block but emerges with a unique impression, every layer marking a moment of contact and preserving that touch. The blocks change with each print too: recording, accumulating, and transforming.
My studio practice trusts emergence—working through simple, direct interactions that unfold into complex entanglements. I examine how bodies in proximity become shapes drawn together, repel one another, or hold tension in the space between. How do bodies become ecologies of mixed beings: assemblages of minerals, microbiomes, and humanness, further mixed with memories of past selves and promises of future ones?