When she was eight years old, Amy Wetsch begged her parents for a microscope so that she could look at pond water under the slides. Her fascination with biology had just begun—she was in and out of doctors’ offices for Crohn’s disease, an autoimmune illness—and the microscope became her portal to processing the world around her. “I wished I could see what was going on inside my body,” she says of that time in her life. Later, in high school and college, painting became a way to deal with her chronic pain. Enrolling in an MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art, she was selected for a multidisciplinary fellowship with Johns Hopkins University that connected art students with scientists—with the aim of visually representing a variety of STEM topics, including microbiology. “I don’t have a science background, but I’m very curious,” Wetsch says. “I ask a lot of questions.” She’s been blending science with the arts ever since.
Her latest multidisciplinary series, Divergent Traces, arose from a 2022 residency with the Association of Icelandic Artists in Reykjavik, Iceland, where she worked with scientists to understand the ecology of that country. The island “hosts such diverse phenomena, from its volcanoes to the northern lights and hydrothermal activity,” she says. “We didn’t know life could survive in these places, but we’re finding it everywhere.” Inspired by the landscape, she created Divergent Traces to juxtapose the survival of these organisms in such extreme environments with her own experience of how “life can be resilient in the face of autoimmune diseases.” At the series installation at Golden Belt Gallery in Durham, North Carolina, sculptures of paper, volcanic ash, and resin protrude from rifts in the floor. Axon-like tendrils reach toward the ceiling against a backdrop of blown glass mounted on the walls to resemble lava. Wetsch says she wanted the sculptures to look organic and familiar, “like something growing under a microscope. Some of the pieces are rotating and spinning, so as the viewer goes into the gallery, they’re walking into a space that’s already alive.”
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