Amy Usdin

Name: Amy Usdin

Studio location: Twin Cities, MN

Website / social links: amyusdin.com, @amyusdin

Loom type or tool preference: I weave on nets, usually stretched across dense foam board with t-pins

Years weaving: 3 adult years

Fiber inclination: recently, silk and linen

Current favorite weaving book: Shelia Hicks’ Weaving as Metaphor

 

 

1. How did you discover weaving and was what your greatest resource as a beginner?

I became inspired by Navajo weavers on a trip in the early 1970s which spurred years of self-taught exploration with textiles as a teen. Pre-internet in Midwest suburbia, I relied on a subscription to Shuttle Spindle & Dyepot and endlessly pored over a few black and white exhibition catalogs that I must have ordered from its back pages. I remember long stints at the library looking at Constantine’s and Larsen’s Beyond Craft: the Art Fabric. The now-iconic artists defining the fiber movement at that time — Magdalena Abakanowicz, Josep Grau-Garriga and Shelia Hicks among them — became my inspiration. 

2. How do you define your practice – do you consider yourself an artist / craftsperson / weaver / designer / general creative or a combination of those? Is this definition important to you?

Though I’m not attached to any descriptor, after throwing myself so completely into an earlier commercial art career that placed client over personal voice, I’m happy to now consider myself an artist.

3. Describe your first experience with weaving.

I think I was thirteen when I made my first piece, a largish tapestry in which I managed straight selvedges but impatiently condensed the top third so the design became uncomfortably smushed. After that, I embraced imperfection and my work took an organic turn, with a lot of draping and pulling of threads. I sometimes attached loom-woven strips to pieces I wove onto the steel rims of fiber shipping drums my father brought home from work, so using make-shift looms probably stayed in my subconscious. I sold enough work to cover my materials, but then went off to college and, in pursuing what I perceived a more stable livelihood, totally shelved that part of my life for a career in art direction.

4. What is your creative process, from the initial idea to the finished piece? Are there specific weave structures, looms, or fibers that are important to your process?

I weave abstract mental and physical landscapes onto aging nets — fly nets meant to keep insects off horses and, more recently, fishing nets. The tactile qualities inherent in each net suggest a direction, informed by the familial moments and unexpected associations that its previous life evokes. Despite my limited relationship to horses or bodies of water, these associations are many and strong.

Though I begin each piece with a specific impulse, I work intuitively, allowing the nets freedom to determine their ultimate direction. It’s a constant negotiation, and the work continually morphs aesthetically and conceptually. I think of Françoise Grossen’s comment: “It is the actual making that brings me closer to what I am trying to say.”

The slow process of needle-weaving around each rope allows room for epic stream of consciousness — or room to think about nothing at all. It’s those long periods of mindfulness that balance the inevitable anxiety that comes when one finished section precludes the way I’ve envisioned the next, given the inflexible structure of the fly net. Every decision is intentional but I need to constantly adapt to accommodate the ever-narrowing options as the work moves toward its final shape.

 5. Does your work have a conceptual purpose or greater meaning? If so, do you center your making around these concepts?

When I first began weaving on aging nets, I’d been caring for a father in declining health and I felt a parallel to the careful but highly imperfect tending of a worn object that had outlived its use. Weaving within and across the fixed borders allowed me space to begin to process the layers of my own history. As I reclaim once-functional nets through the personal and historically feminine gaze of compliance, erasure, renewal, motherhood and eldercare, I consider my own changing use.

What began as autobiographical meditation is evolving into work that more broadly speaks to revolving ecologies and histories, to loss and longing and to the dissonance of nostalgia. I explore the tension between nets as protection, nets as entrapment and the often-blurred boundaries in between, questioning the meaning of objects and our own conceptions of security.

 

6. What is your favorite part of the weaving process and why? What’s your least favorite?

I love the promise of a new piece and the near-end when I realize I’ve figured it out. The in-between is a lot of creating problems and then solving them as I coax the fixed warp into a three-dimensional form. I accept those challenges as part of my process, but they create a roller coaster with huge dips of uncertainty.

7. Do you sell your work or make a living from weaving? If so, what does that look like and how has that affected your studio practice?

I have smaller works, including the Drift Series, that I hope to sell to keep my practice sustainable. Because rope fly nets are hard to come by and because those sculptures take hundreds of hours to complete, I’ve focused on building a body of work for exhibition rather than sale – but some of those are available as well.

8. Where do you find inspiration?

Small moments and vast landscapes inspire me. My materials, especially the old fly nets, move me. Each conveys a life lived, a sense of intimacy like a comfortable hand-me-down. I’m reminded that horses are social creatures capable of loneliness, anxiety, fear and sadness — parallel human conditions — and their worn nets elicit a sort of empathy. They trigger waves of memory and association, but also fuel imagination.

9. What other creatives do you admire – weavers, artists, entrepreneurs – and why?

I continue to find inspiration in the work of the artists that initially drew me in, with special appreciation for Shelia Hicks whose massive Lifelines exhibition a few years ago was the first fiber show I’d personally seen. Surrounded by her work, both intimate and immense, I was thrown back to my early weaving years and knew in that moment that I needed to reengage the medium.

Al Loving’s torn and stitched canvases of the ‘70s, influenced by a quilt exhibit at the Whitney, are a complete departure from his earlier geometric work. The ability to pivot so completely and intentionally is as inspiring as the art itself. I find Nick Cave’s work deeply honest, creating beauty and optimism from oppression and fear. I’m fascinated by his words: “I’m working toward what I’m leaving behind.”

I’m in awe of unexpected theater. Years later, I still feel moments of choreography from Julie Taymor’s Lion King and the genre-bending invention of 1927’s The Animals and Children Took to the Streets. I admire quiet storytellers like filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda (Shoplifters, Nobody Knows) and author Kjersti A. Skomsvold (The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am).

I’m grateful for the generosity of artists who teach — there are many, but special admiration for the always inspirational Ann Coddington.

10. If you could no longer weave, what would you do instead?

I’ve always wanted to paint in a big and messy way. I’d garden by day, paint by night.