Amy Meissner

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work emerges from within and in response to my experience with motherhood. This is a messy underbelly, rarely supported, understood, or acknowledged in a society that reveres a polished, well kept mother and her clean, bright children. This perception excludes so many of us. So my impulse is to stitch, mostly by hand. This isn’t fast work. It’s a quiet skill that feels tenuous, nearly lost when placed in a contemporary context; it slips away like childhood, like domesticity, like safety beneath the weight of something handmade. I sew because I don’t know what it is to not sew. It’s this expectation of what the hand-sewn form is — protective, warm, decorative — so much like the definition of the domestic role, which compels me to heave against it. I take the traditional, beautiful handwork I was taught as a girl, then later as a professional seamstress and couch it within the painful, uncomfortable, or frightening. My intent is to create thoughtful, arresting work, reliant on layers of narrative within the pieces themselves and within the history each viewer brings.

This is time-based work, using old skills. An act of cutting apart, then piecing oneself back together.

ARTIST BIO

Alaska artist Amy Meissner combines traditional handwork, found objects, and abandoned textiles to reference the literal, physical, and emotional work of women. Her repair, remaking, and manipulation of discarded household cloth serves as cultural nod to embroidery created by generations of Scandinavian women in her family and as space for confronting societal disregard of women’s handwork. Her place-based social practice approaches clothing and textile repair for and with others as an act of prolonging, care, and accompaniment of vulnerable objects in transition. She has exhibited internationally, with work collected by the Anchorage Museum, the Alaska State Museum, and the International Quilt Museum in Lincoln Nebraska. With a background in clothing design, writing, and illustration, she holds undergraduate degrees in both art and textiles, an MFA in Creative Writing, and an MA in Critical Craft Studies. She is raising children on Dena’ina Homeland, in an area currently referred to as Anchorage.