Blue moves its way across Amber Jensen’s textile work in the form of stitches, woven patches, and dye. Hand embroidered x’s, in groupings of blue hues, traverse the woolen, collaged terrains. A spectrum of shades implies light and depth. In her compositions, the artist offers us the barest suggestion of pattern and our attention is held, our minds stretching to name the song from a few bars of a long-forgotten melody.
Separate from her design practice, Jensen consciously protects her fine art practice. It is a location safeguarded from rules and obligations, shielded from the constraints of earning a livelihood, harbored even from the fear of committing error. It is a space away. Inside of this walled-off paradise, the artist can conduct her collage-like symphony of yarny stitches and dye puddles with abandon. She is free to wander where she is called: from tone to tone, stitch to stitch. It is exactly this many-layered marshland, or more specifically the deliberate act of building it, where the artist meets the spiritual. Entering the cloth with yet another stitch, then exiting to examine the mark, Jensen submerges and emerges, each time renewed.
“I envision myself high up above, hovering in the sky. I gently drop my arm down to softly create a new stitch, orchestrating each as one long continuous thread. I pour pools of blue dye, dripping around the edges, allowing the wool to sop it up in concentrated areas. I am like the moon, pulling and pushing the tides, rhythmic and pliant.”
“I envision myself high up above, hovering in the sky. I gently drop my arm down to softly create a new stitch, orchestrating each as one long continuous thread."
On a floor loom Jensen weaves the ground cloth onto which her embroideries are built, ‘like an artist making her own paper.’ Her hands and shuttle dive through the shed of the warp. Her woven cloth acts like a blank canvas. The structure of weaving, explains the artist, is rather anonymous, and tied to the grid. It does not possess an innate individuality. In going back into the woven cloth however, with embroidery and dye, the artist finds her own hand. Weaving is akin to our common anatomy, the unanimous architecture of our organs and bones. But it is the specificity of how our DNA is expressed which cannot be duplicated – where we individuate.
For this reason, the artist is compelled to graduate her woven substrates into singular works of art. But the prolonged process, its slowness, the permission to respond unhurriedly to the nuances of the ensuing terrain is where this artist finds connection, and ultimately: self.
The evolution of these blue terrains also offers the possibility of rebirth, and perhaps even redemption. As the process unfurls, missteps are made. Jensen responds by adding dye, adding more stitches. Missteps become essential, an informed progression towards something deeper. The chains of x’s parade across, connected at the back. Jensen describes them as ‘holding hands.’ They seem to wade through the blueness, awash in possibility.
Jensen cites the song “There’s a Blue Light,” by Crooked Fingers:
And I softly sing this song to myself… “come to the shore, everyone’s waiting, to be made pure, to be redone. Come to the shore and jump right into the blue water where we can sleep and soon begin again.”
Blue for this artist is the regenerative space of renewal, inside of the protected realm of her practice. It offers the ultimate freedom: the freedom to be in whatever way called, safe in the knowledge that blueness affords the opportunity to be redone.
And I softly sing this song to myself… “come to the shore, everyone’s waiting, to be made pure, to be redone. Come to the shore and jump right into the blue water where we can sleep and soon begin again.”
After living in the forest within the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina for nearly a decade, Amber returned to her childhood homeland in the Midwest. She is currently working out of a small, light-filled studio in South Minneapolis, MN. Woven, stitched or drawn, all her works capture elements of her home – the magical colors, flora and fauna, rivers and lakes, and the friends and family that she surrounds herself with.
Jensen’s education led from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design to the Eugene Textile Center and the John C. Campbell Folk School. She has committed to sharing her skill by joining the weaving department at the North House Folk School in Grand Marais, MN beginning in February 2022. She’s created works for the Walker Art Center and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. Her works have been shown all over the globe. Last year she began exhibiting her textile artworks in galleries including Blue Spiral in Asheville, NC. She has won several awards for her innovative product design, most recently North Carolina’s “Our State Magazine Style Award”. She has been a visiting artist at Penland School of Craft several times.
To learn more about the work of Amber Jensen visit ambermjensen.com / @amberm.jensen
