Giving Time to Plastic Bags XI (framed)

Giving Time to Plastic Bags XI, 2018

Found Plastic Bag and Brass Rods

83 x 48cm

Series of 17 unique works

Amy Rusch

Amy explores an expression of mark-making, using stitched thread into layers of found plastic bags. The layered 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. The works can be seen as tracings, translations or mappings of sensory lived - body experiences, becoming multi-sensory coalescences of sound, vibration, line and colour.  

”Cutting, stitching, heating, pulling, binding, gathering, layering – these practices demanding their own rhythm. The motions enacted provides 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. It’s about sitting with the remnants of man-made materials; human time in contrast to the elemental and deep time.”

Amy worked on a body of work titled ‘LINEATIONS and Times Pathway’ for SESSIONS 2022, a 7-month process for visual artists guided by Dominique Edwards. Lines contained in the works are isomorphic markings like the lines on a nautical chart, or lines plotted on a map that represent motion and movement across the earth’s surface. She thinks too of the invisible “thinking strings”, the lines that empathetically extend and connect us with all – human and more than human. 

Amy Rusch studied Motion Picture Production Design at City Varsity, School of Media and Creative Arts (2009 – 2011). The process-based skills, including sculpting, moulding, casting, prosthetic production and special effects make-up, equipped her to work in a number of fields: film, television and theatre as well as freelance projects and commission-based work with industrial designers, architects, archaeologists, and boat builders. 

Amy worked as a lecturer in City Varsity’s art department (2018, 2019) and part-time at Peter Clarke Art Centre as an extra-mural art teacher (2021). Amy was represented by SMITH Gallery (2018-2020) exhibiting in multiple group shows, as well as Investec Cape Town Art Fair and FNB Art Joburg (2019, 2020). 

Amy exhibited a piece at the Pretoria Art Museum as part of the Sasol New Signatures Finalists Exhibition 2021, and at Iziko South African National Gallery as part of the ‘Matereality’ Exhibition (2020 – 2021). In that same year she exhibited a work at Zeitz MOCAA in their show ‘Home Is Where The Art Is’. In 2022 Amy exhibited a solo body of work titled ‘Seeing with a Listening Ear’ at SMAC gallery, Stellenbosch. She’s recently been selected as one of 30 shortlisted finalists to exhibit at the Norval Foundation as part of the Norval Sovereign African Art Prize 2023.

Amy 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 Sapiens Behaviour Exhibition’ at Spier, Iziko South African Museum and at the Wits Origins Centre in Johannesburg.