Amy Gross writes, “My embroidered and beaded fiber pieces are my attempt to merge the natural observable world with my own inner life: I’m trying to remake nature sieved through my own experiences. I’ve always been attracted and frightened by things that are in their fullest bloom but on the verge of spoiling. There’s beauty and sadness in them, heightened by the undeniable inevitability of their ending. The process forces me to look at and think about what I would rather pretend does not exist – the heedlessness of time, the undermining by the invisible. I started mining nature, finding elements in it that paralleled my private world, of life merging into life, manipulating and altering each other.

My elements mimic both the microscopic and life forms in our human eye-scale. They grow, they take over, they climb, much like those intricately odd plants and spores and insect life along paths, those microcosms underfoot. My only rule is that my living things are not corporeal, they’re imitation. They do not die. They diagram stages of decay and change, they don’t demonstrate them. It’s a fantasy of human control, impossible, but somehow necessary. My making these objects will not stop time, but it holds things still, in place, for a little while.”

Amy received her BFA from Cooper Union and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. She then returned to New York, establishing Color Box Studio, Inc, specializing in textile and surface design, and Amy Designs, Inc, focusing on children’s product development. Since moving to Florida in 1999, she has been working in fiber, first in jewelry making, then into nature based beaded and embroidered canvases and three dimensional objects. She was granted the South Florida Cultural Consortium award in 2006, and has shown her work widely in Florida and throughout the United States.