Amelia Briggs

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA

Artist statement

Amelia Briggs’s soft sculptures examine themes of interiority, memory, and transformation through plump, whimsical forms that switch between the familiar and the uncanny. Working with fiber, reclaimed materials, fabric, panel, glass, latex, and gouache, Briggs reinterprets fragments of memory and childhood objects, shaping them into sinuous forms that suggest botanical growth, bodily organs, and imagined ecosystems. Through processes of sewing, cutting, stuffing, layering, and assembling, materials become vessels for embodied experience, in which personal history is absorbed and transformed into new forms. Informed by the history of fiber work as a repository of memory, labor, repair, and self- expression, Briggs embraces the tactile and accumulative qualities of fiber, extending them into sculptural forms that blur distinctions between painting, craft, and object. Reclaimed materials, such as bed sheets, clothing, and fiber, preserve traces of past lives, allowing the work to embody cycles of use, transformation, and renewal. Drawing on her early training as a figure painter, Briggs explores how experiences are internalized and shape perception through the concept of embodiment. Although the human figure no longer appears in her work, Briggs sees her practice as an effort to turn the body inside out. Soft, swollen forms become manifestations of psychological and emotional landscapes, while exaggerated contours and playful surfaces invite viewers into spaces that are at once...

Artwork