We recently connected with Amy Butowicz and have shared our conversation below.

Amy, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Do you wish you had started sooner?

We arrive when we are ready. I don’t believe there is a right, better or correct time to dedicate one’s life to a creative career. I could spend time wishing I would have gone to an art school, achieved a BFA or spent less time in my twenties exploring different passions but all the roads I have taken have led me to the place I am now. All the experiences, adventures, failures, and commitments to different interests enrich my work in the studio and provide my own unique lens to see the world through.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

My journey as an artist began with a love of photography. I took my first photography class when I was in high school and was lucky enough to have a fantastic art teacher that supported my aspirations by giving me additional opportunities and encouragement. In early 2001 I found myself living in a remote mountain town selling cell phones door to door. During a sales call I met a local business owner whose company sold artwork to hotels. This meeting ended up shifting a direction in my life. After setting up his Verizon account and Motorola StarTAC, I started my career as an art consultant and creative for the hospitality industry. Through this career, I have been afforded the gift to spend my working life in the visual arts, making a sustainable living that supplements and supports my life as an exhibiting artist. My studio practice relies on the handmade, process, and intuition. I believe in operating a sustainable studio. My works size and weight are what I can build, move, and carry. I avoid toxic materials, unnecessary waste, and I am committed to sourcing as many supplies as possible that I can transport using my bicycle and trailer. I work fluidly between sculpture and drawing to create allegorical narratives that explore the sexual body and its degeneration. The sculptures are made from sewn and painted canvas, fabric, wood, and plaster and are derived from my lived experience with a feminized body, bound to the demands and performances of a normative history. My sculptures are animated and anthropomorphic, they slip between human, abstract, and figurative. Mining the history of design and ornamentation, I elevate what has been historically discarded as being void of intellectual rigor into sculptural forms that explore a collapse of the traditional categories that define the One and the Other. I pour all my energy into understanding their gesture and what is required to fully activate them. I think of them as personalities, I ask myself what they are saying and how do they want to say it. The sculptures are bodies and performers. I give them autonomy through understanding them as individuals. It is my desire for them to be seductive and disquieting, seeming if ready to walk away or beckon the viewer with humor. My drawings are not preparatory studies for sculpture. For me, drawing is a change in how I use my mind and body in making. Drawing has immediacy, it exists in the present tense, in the time of unfolding, it is a state of becoming. It is the visual discovery of embodying a feeling through shape, weight, and line. It is how the marks inhabit the space of the paper and how their physical relationships affect meaning. I am captivated by the risk associated with making a mark without the ease of erasure, tampering with the freshness of the drawing, and altering the emotion and movement it emits. This is a process that is synonymous with time, it keeps moving forward, without erasure, what is done is done. One of my favorite passages about drawing is by Julia Kristeva in “The Severed Head: Capital Visions”; “No distance between the thought and the hand: their instantaneous unity grasps and redraws the most concentrated interiority into visible bodies.” Drawing holds spontaneity, experimentation, directness, rawness, simplicity, and a modesty of means. Whether I am engaged in sculpture or drawing, it is the state of becoming that keeps me returning to the studio. In sculpture, this is when I understand the final details that bring a work into being, as if it could walk away. And in drawing, with every unfolding line, mark, and gesture, this state of becoming is instantaneous.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

A thriving creative ecosystem begins through offering artists more opportunities for affordable studio and living spaces. The purchase and commissioning of locally made art and objects is paramount to an artist’s continued exploration. Attendance at open studios, lectures, and panel discussions keeps the dialog alive between artists, collectors, and enthusiasts. Becoming a member of your local museums, art centers and non-profits, supports the network that protects and expands the arts.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

My life as an artist is rewarded through my continued education resulting from inquisitive studio exploration and play. I find there is a never-ending thread of ideas to explore, other artists to study, experiments to consider and play to be simply become lost in. For me, time in the studio is a gift of being in the moment, allowing the present, past and future to enfold upon itself. The reward is following my intuition and suppressing judgement.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.amybutowicz.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amybutowicz/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-butowicz-8951852/

Image Credits
Daniel Greer