"My work explores a vibrational expression of mark-making, using stitched thread into layers of found plastic bags. Work across disciplines gives me a strong connection to early mark-makers. The layers of plastic, connected by the motion and soundscape produced by the machine, communicate aural and material aspects of our modern culture, and the threads are an attempt to link and comprehend millions of years of layered stratigraphic time. For this, I owe respect always to early mark-makers. They are a deep part of why I make in the way that I do today, with threads and plastic.

The works become pieces that feel like ‘sound drawings’, or ‘fields of energy.’[i]

Doing what I do, I am confronted by present-day materials like plastic that might become the primary artefact of our time, when we look back. Conceptually I have been pushed to bring disparate time frames together, using archaeological sediments as a guiding mark and plastic, which is so of the now.

When I am stitching, I adjust the tension of the machine. It allows the needle to draw thread from below to the surface. Something is made visible by this action that would otherwise be hidden– in the past, behind, underneath or beneath the surface of the plastic. Visually a co-presence occurs. There is an in-between, a then and now, where everything can be lived and felt; our vulnerability, resilience, scars, resistance.

I began making art as a full time practice after spending time at three archaeological sites, Klipdrift shelter, Klasies River and Blombos cave on the African southern Cape coast.[ii] At these places early Homo sapiens began making symbolic marks for the first time. My entry into art came through the earliest marks made on this continent.

My current body of work is informed by ocean crossings, archaeological excavations and microscopic studies of the living world. My practice can be seen as tracings, translations or mappings of sensory lived–body experiences, becoming multisensory coalescences of sound, vibration, line and colour studies.

”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.”

Mostly, I use threads passed down from my maternal great grandmother and grandmother, paternal grandmother and great aunt, the female makers in our family. Choosing to use inherited threads is a Finally, I find Bachelard’s language and insights helpful. He speaks of listening rather than interrogation. He also identifies a distinctive quality to reverberation, which he says links reverberation to time; “the distant past resounds with echoes, and it is hard to know at what depth these echoes will reverberate and die away.” The sense I gain from this is that “reverberation,” carried by the created image has the capacity to convey the fullness of time within a given temporal time frame.

[i] Sean O’Toole (2022). Seeing with a listening ear. SMAC Gallery, exhibition catalogue. Museum display copies of artefacts that I made have been exhibited in the ‘Origins of Early Southern              

[ii]Sapiens’ Exhibition in Johannesburg, Cape Town as well as in Norway, at the University of Bergen. conscious part of my practice, keeping our female family making lineage alive." 

- Amy Rusch

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