Amelia Briggs recently packed-up and moved from Nashville to Brooklyn. In Nashville she was making these wild soft sculptures and her studio, in a detached garage behind her home, overflowed with fabrics, found objects, colorful furs and stuffing. Her new Bushwick studio is smaller. She’s downsized to a tabletop in a space she shares with a fashion designer who recently worked on a couple of Margot Robbie’s Barbie red carpet looks and has a lot of bow experiments pinned to the wall. There’s a full wall of windows overlooking an industrial landscape. Amelia’s new paintings are smaller and she has simplified her materials, working with oil paint on paper. You can definitely see the influence of her sculptural works in these new compositions. She’s painting undulating, tentacle like forms that weave together and then come undone. They are plant-like tendrils, or sea creature tentacles, or Medusa’s snake hair. They are bodily: manicured fingernails dissolve into a puff of smoke, intestines tie up in knots. A seashell unfurls. A birth of something new.

ARTIST BIO

Amelia Briggs is a NYC-based multidisciplinary artist working between fiber, painting, and installation. She has exhibited internationally, and her work is included in collections in South Korea, Australia, Sweden, Italy, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, and throughout the US. Recent publications include Forbes, The New York Times, Boston Art Review, Elle Decor, Architectural Digest, Artforum, Clever, Domino Magazine, New American Paintings, Art Maze Magazine, Surface Magazine, and Contemporary Art Review LA. Briggs has completed residencies at Wassaic Project, Monson Arts, and Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. Her work was recently exhibited at Art Basel with LVMH in Culture House.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work illustrates the interior landscape and the unknowable complexity that resides there. Driven by a need to seek resolution through expression after an emotional trauma, I translate feelings into sinuous forms that consider our body’s natural relationship to biology and gesture. Influenced by the psychology of body language and the study of natural systems, these forms surround, hoist, touch, caress and prop, frozen in a communion of transformation. Their subtle shifts in color demonstrate the longing for expansion while the suggestion of a border is repeated, limiting what is possible while protecting what exists.