In Memoriam

Curated by Peggi Erickson, Deborah Milton & Mary Ann Proctor

EXHIBIT DESCRIPTION

Earlier this year, local artist Amy Aspell reached out to the Gallery at Grace to propose a retrospective – what would have been her first show in decades. Sadly, she passed away in April before the show could come to light. However, her artist friends: Peggi Erickson, Deborah Milton, and Mary Ann Proctor, rallied, and have pulled together Amy’s art to tell the story of a life well-lived. Through painting, prints, collage, sculpture and tapestries, her creativity, exuberant personality, intelligence, and sense of humor are evident.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Written on behalf of Amy by her close friend Mary Ann Proctor

When I think of Amy and her art, I think of a weaver—someone who understood that she was not only part of the web of life, but also a participant in its making.

I remember walking down Winslow with her when cottonwood fluff had drifted across the sidewalk. Amy stopped, picked some up, and said, “Oh, you could do something with this.” I was puzzled. Rake it up? Throw it away? But she was imagining something entirely different. She was wondering what it might become. It was not until I later saw a piece she had woven from dryer lint that I understood she was completely serious.

Amy had a gift for seeing possibility where others saw only the ordinary. Art was not separate from life for her. It was a way of entering into life, collaborating with it, and helping it become something more.

Her prints, too, were woven from the threads of her early life. Growing up on a farm in Illinois became part of the fabric of her work. In Bobbing for Apples, the fine-lined attention, the joy, and the affection for remembered moments invite me to slow down and truly look. Nothing is hurried. Nothing is lost. The work reflects a life lived with attention and care. It speaks of family, belonging, and the quiet gift of having a beloved sister.

Then there are the weavings themselves. Standing before the drawing of one of her large loom pieces, I find myself imagining Amy at work. Thread by thread, color by color, she sat before a forest of strings, seeing a pattern that did not yet exist and patiently bringing it into being. The cloth grows beneath her hands, row by row, choice by choice. What amazes me is not only the complexity of the pattern, but the faith required to create it—the ability to hold the whole design in mind while working patiently on a single thread.

Perhaps that is why her weavings feel so alive. Woven into them are generosity, intelligence, skill, and time, but also a question: What pattern are we creating with our own lives? It seems, in some ways, a precursor to her later work as a minister in Science of Mind, where the focus shifted from weaving threads into cloth to weaving meaning into a life.

A ceramic crow speaks to me differently. Shaped by hand, it carries an intimacy that feels alive, as though the form emerged naturally beneath her fingers. Yet behind that seeming ease is intention—the artist’s willingness to spend time in conversation with a material until it reveals what it wants to be.

What I remember most is that Amy moved through the world paying attention. Whether it was cottonwood fluff on a sidewalk, memories of a childhood farm, a crow shaped in clay, or lint gathered from a dryer, she entered into a relationship with what she found. She seemed to ask, “What else could this become?” and then gave her time, skill, and imagination to the answer.

Amy did not stand apart from life. She participated in it. She understood that every thread gains strength from its relationship to the whole, and she spent her life helping reveal those connections. Through her art, her ministry, and her friendships, she threaded her loom—and her life—with love.

— Mary Ann Proctor