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. ”Cutting, stitching, heating, pulling, binding, gathering, layering – these practices demand their own rhythm by turns slow and meticulous then quick, fast interventions. The motions enacted in making provide a retrospective link to the embodied experiences, transmuted in the process. The machine stitching into plastic is not about replicating an experience, an object, or anything formally understood. The process is about sitting with the remnants of man- made materials; human time in contrast to the elemental and deep time.”
Recent exhibitions include presentations at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair 2024 and FNB Art Joburg 2024 with Suburbia Contemporary. Amy presented a solo body of work with SMAC gallery in 2022 titled Seeing with a Listening Ear, a culmination of 3 years of making. She exhibited at the Norval Foundation as part of the Norval Sovereign African Art Prize 2023 finalists exhibition. She has shown work at the Pretoria Art Museum, Iziko South African National Gallery as well as the Zeitz MOCAA.
Amy studied Motion Picture Production Design at City Varsity, School of Media and Creative Arts (2009 – 2011). The process- based skills acquired, including sculpting, moulding, casting, prosthetic production and special effects make-up have equipped her to work in a number of fields including film, television and theatre as well as on freelance projects and commission-based work with industrial designers, architects, archaeologists, and boat builders.
Amy worked as a lecturer in the Art Department at City Varsity in 2018 and 2019, and part-time at Peter Clarke Art Centre as an extra- mural art teacher in 2021.
She was part of the team who made museum display copies of artefacts from archaeological sites, Blombos Cave, Klipdrift Shelter and Klasies River Mouth. These have been exhibited in the ‘Origins of Early Southern Sapiens Behaviour Exhibition’ at Spier, Iziko South African Museum, at the Wits Origins Centre in Johannesburg, as well as in Norway, at the University of Bergen. Amy has a fulltime studio practice alongside participation in ongoing archaeological and film projects in the northern Cape, Kalahari and the southern Cape coast.