Amy Young
Artist Profile: Amy Young
Synthetic Binds of Opposing Ideas
By Mary Grace Bernard
Amy Young (b. 1995) is a master weaver of binaries. Originally from Shawnee, Oklahoma, Young is a recent MFA graduate from Colorado State University living and working in Fort Collins, Colorado. As a bisexual, mixed-race woman growing up in the American Great Plains, Young’s identity in relation to her surroundings is a key component of her art practice. [1]
In this practice, she explores the boundaries of weaving and the complexities of gendered spaces and individual development. [2] Her most recent body of work, Synthetic Inquiry of Four-Letter Words (2019-2021), combines modern, synthetic fabrics with the ancient method of weaving. In a small studio space, she works intimately with her large loom to create intricate tapestries that tell stories of how identity develops from adolescence into adulthood. Specifically, Young encapsulates her own complex experiences with interpersonal relationships to disrupt the binary mold of human development (e.g., strictly female or male, black or white, gay or straight, etc.) in “western” culture(s). [3]
An illustration of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of Smooth and Striated Space. Image sourced from https://soundand.design/interactive-narrative-6-facets-of-storyworlds-c16065d7faf4.
When seen through the lens of French scholars Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s technological model of smooth space and striated space, we can understand Young’s artworks as ideas in opposition that are always in the state of becoming the other. In other words, like Deleuze and Guattari, Young weaves together binaries in order to break them.
Deleuze, a philosopher, and Guattari, a psychoanalyst and political activist, wrote several theoretical works together that address the wandering nature of knowledge and identity. In their 1980 work A Thousand Plateaus, the two analyze how all life is multiplicitous, complex, and forever changing. They define smooth space as nomadic and always moving; and striated space as sedentary, static, and unchanging. [4] Smooth space is constantly being translated and shifted into a striated space, while striated space is constantly being reversed and returned to a smooth space. [5] Together, smooth and striated space form a binary in a perpetual state of two opposites becoming one and the other.
Amy Young, Dream Story, 2021, second-hand wedding dresses and cotton yarn, 48 x 32 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
When translated into textiles, and weaving in particular, we can see smooth and striated space in the interlacing of the two distinct sets of threads that form a piece of fabric. The warp, which is static, and the weft, which is in constant movement, come together as counterparts to compose a unified whole. As art historian T’ai Smith explains, “the practice of weaving is structurally analogous to the process of building, working from the base and adding to it [...]. Through a systematic procedure of weaving weft through warp, back and forth, [an] image emerges from bottom to top.” [6]
Amy Young, So What Are We?, 2021, porcelain beads, snow-dyed cotton yarn, butterfly hair clips, and wool yarn, 31 x 31 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
When we apply these ideas to Amy Young’s practice, we can perceive how her artworks layer smooth and striated space both materially and conceptually. In fact, the artist’s concepts are embedded in the material and the process of making the final artworks. [7] By interweaving cotton yarn and repurposed wedding dresses purchased from second-hand stores—as she does in Dream Story (2021)—or cotton and wool yarn with butterfly hair clips and porcelain beads—as she does in So, What Are We? (2021)—Young simultaneously intertwines conflicting ideas of marriage and divorce, friendship and estrangement, love and hate, as well as emotions of confidence and anxiety. She entangles these relationships in a developmental web of movement where the conceptual and physical experience of making are continuously transformed into one and another.
A detail image of Amy Young, So What Are We?, 2021, porcelain beads, snow-dyed cotton yarn, butterfly hair clips, and wool yarn, 31 x 31 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
As humans develop from adolescence to adulthood and beyond, we are always in the state of becoming something or someone else. Our identities are constantly forming, changing, and transitioning as a result of our complex embodiments and relationships. These ideas come to the fore in two of Young’s works in particular: Gone Fishing (2021) and America’s Favorite Past Time (2021).
Amy Young, Gone Fishing, 2021, soft fishing lures, cotton, iron sinkers, bra pads, fishing pole, spray paint, and soda tabs, 30 x 28 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
Gone Fishing is a weaving of soft fishing lures, cotton, iron sinkers, bra pads, a fishing pole, spray paint, and soda tabs. Disrupting her own heteronormative upbringing, Young intertwines the physical and theoretical concepts of sports (i.e., masculinity) and the act of weaving (i.e., femininity) to highlight her queer identity and the importance of the natural spectrum of sexuality.
Amy Young, America’s Favorite Past Time, 2021, white leather, cotton yarn, chewing gum, baseball gloves, baseball bats, acrylic nails, pink latex, and baseballs, 42 x 36 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
In America’s Favorite Past Time (2021), Young continues her inquiry into bisexuality through an exploration of sports as homosocial spaces. Chewing gum, baseball gloves, baseball bats, and baseballs are all interwoven with white leather and cotton yarn—the actual materials of a baseball. Using red cotton yarn as the warp and white leather cord as the weft, Young critiques the West’s hetero-masculine obsession with sports by reminding us of the homosocial and even homoerotic nature of sports.
“In the making of Gone Fishing, I realized how stereotypical dating quotes and locker room banter connect sex and sports constantly in the English language. These sayings and banter are overbearingly masculine and seemed ripe for social commentary when coupled with queer sensibility and the craft of weaving (often associated with women’s work).” [8]
The history of weaving as “women’s work” dates back hundreds of years and it has only recently been included in art history. As Smith explains, the “weaving practice is, on the one hand, ‘feminine’—unable to sublate the body and its labor into the transcendental realm of painting, and on the other hand, ‘feminized’—kept untheorized, or without discursive parameters.” [9] Traditionally regarded as industrial work or a handicraft due to the weaver’s overtly structured product—as opposed to painting, which is purportedly unanticipated and “free”—weaving’s laborious nature is regarded as feminine. [10] Indeed, as Young admits, “The loom set-up and the process of weaving are quite time consuming, but it is also mostly stationary which is my favorite mode of working.” [11]
What is remarkable about weaving, however, is that, unlike painting, where the formal idea is painted on top of the canvas or panel, the weaver’s conceptual image is simultaneously the artwork’s structure. As Smith shows:
“The technical practice of weaving is necessarily sequential. With the process of adding weft to weft, over and under the warp, bit by bit, the compositional field is literally built. At once analogous to the architect who conceives a building and the laborer who constructs it, the weaver develops the design in tandem with the fabrication of the surface.” [12]
Amy Young, Frenemy Bracelet, 2019, slip-cast porcelain beads, vinyl plastic, and cotton, 32 x 24 inches. Image by DARIA.
Young constructs each one of her panels, row by row, over and under, tying concept to material and material to concept. Moving back and forth with her loom, she reflects on her own transformations, embodiments, and relationships. In her completed artworks, such as Frenemy Bracelet (2020), she asks viewers to do the same. Through an art practice that is structured within a set of dimensional boundaries, Amy Young suggests the multiplicity of identity.
You can see Young’s work for yourself in the group exhibition FACE of Fiber in the Rockies at the Art Center of Estes Park. The exhibition is on view from June 11 to July 17, 2021.
Mary Grace (MG) Bernard is a crip, queer, emerging artist, independent curator, and art writer living with cystic fibrosis, a chronic illness that informs her daily art and writing practices. MG analyzes contemporary performance artists through performances of her own. To break down binaries, she makes the invisibility of chronic illness visible and advocates for the importance of bringing the (dis)abled community to the forefront of art historical and theoretical conversations. MG focuses on intersectional discussions of the “bodymind” and the relationships between the public and private spheres of experience. In addition to performance, her practice incorporates sculpture, photography, installation, new and transmedia, graphic and web design, digital video, and social practice. Central to her social practice work is Femme Salée, a digital platform dedicated to starting and sharing difficult conversations absent from the art world. She holds a BA from the University of New Orleans, and two MAs—one from New York University and the other from the University of Denver. She is a current artist in residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, Louisiana.
[1] Amy Young, “Artist Bio” (Spring 2021).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Amy Young, “Artist Statement” (Spring 2021).
[4] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “1440: The Smooth and the Striated” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota: 1987).
[5] Ibid.
[6] T’ai Smith, “‘Pictures made of wool’: The Gender of Labor at the Bauhaus Weaving Workshop (1919-23)” in InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, 4 (2002), https://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue4-IVC/TSmith.html
[7] Ibid.
[8] Email interview with the author, May 26, 2021.
[9] Smith, “‘Pictures made of wool.’”
[10] Ibid.
[11] Email interview with the author, June 2, 2021.
[12] Smith, “‘Pictures made of wool.’”
