„I live in Wales but originally I am from Chicago, where I had based my work on the landscape of buildings and the feeling that the buildings were in conversation with each other; huge towering figures that made humans insignificant. I was inspired by the poems of Carl Sandburg who wrote many poems about the city. From „Skyscraper“
I loom in the smoke
And the stars
And have a soul
When I moved to a very rural area of Wales, I felt a loss of inspiration until I visited Berlin in 2004 where the style of architecture caused me to work with a new energy. Since then I have combined the views of „the rural idyll“ of Wales with comic asides and graphic exclamations to create work. Coming back to Berlin I hope to have a new inspiration to create new work of collages. Buildings all have their own personalities and I imagine them having intense conversations and arguments over the cityscape and architectural styles!“
Amy Sterly is a printmaker and sculptor and originally from Chicago. She moved to the U.K. in 1989 and has since exhibited throughout the UK, Europe and the USA. She received a Wales Arts International Travel award in 2004 to attend the Lessedra 3rdInternational Print Exhibition in Sofia, Bulgaria and in 2012 to travel to Finland to research architecture and print which led to an exhibit in Hyvinkaa. She received an Arts Council Wales Grant in 2006 to research Printmakers in Wales and in 2013 to create a booklet for the Finland/Wales exchange exhibition.
In 2014 she received and Arts Council Research grant for the ‘Sound Books’ project. She combined sound and book works together to create an installation at the Test Bed space at Oriel Davies. This led to a large production grant in 2015 from ACW to develop Sound Book Project, a collaboration of artists and musicians using books to create a soundscape performance. In 2018 she was awarded a residency at the Ratamo Printmaking and Photography Centre in Jyvaskyla, Finland where she was able to create new experimental printwork. In 2020 she became part of Ty Cerdd’s CoDi Experimental project and is on their composer database. Most recently she has worked with the libraries creating collaborative sound pieces in response to ancient manuscripts in their collections, including the Bodleian Library in Oxford in 2021 and the National Library of Wales in 2023. She attends various artists’ book fairs around the UK to show her work.
“I want my art to trigger emotion and memory and change the object into something that you may not expect.”
www.amysterly.com