Drawn to the interplay of grief and ecology, Amberlie Perkin examines how curious and embodied engagement with the natural environment can provide a visual and material language to articulate the complex and often abstract emotions of grieving. Her works are an expression of both the body’s fragility and incredible resilience in the face of illness and disease. By reflecting on nature and through rigorous material exploration, Perkin has found new ways to understand and respond to illness, disease, and death as they pertain to her own body and the bodies of those she has loved.

Perkin’s creative process enacts the materiality of mourning using grief and loss as lively material with which to build new forms while formalizing the presence of absence. By working with divergent materials she illustrates the resonance of the human body echoed in cycles of nature. There is a tactility and physicality to the organic clay forms as they grow, morph, and eventually petrify, while the ephemeral quality of paper is perpetually layering and shedding in delicate veils.

Through relief printing Perkin captures the intricate yet fleeting traces of fragmented bark and lichen on fragile handmade paper. Her nest-like sculptures explore the proliferation of disease, lost kinship, miscarriage, and the desire to nurture and steward. Building the hollow forms and fervently layering their surfaces is a means to process and articulate loss while honouring persistent ghosts.

Perkin invites the viewer to locate grief in their own bodies and consider how the natural world reflects and gives shape to loss.

MEDIUM

paper, natural materials, clay

ARTIST BIO

Amberlie Perkin is an interdisciplinary artist and art educator.  Her artwork investigates grief, kinship and the body as a wounded ecology. Perkin’s diverse practice is deeply rooted in the embodied experience of engaging with nature. Her creative processes enact cycles of regeneration, using grief and loss as dynamic material with which to build new forms. Her installations engender empathy while offering new modes of memory and memorial. Perkin holds both an MFA and BFA from Emily Carr University of Art & Design. She is the founder of Studio One One Six in Vancouver BC.

In 2021, Amberlie was a TedX speaker for the TEDXemilycarru Recognize series. In 2022, she was awarded the Emerging Artist Award by the Seymour Art Gallery, and the Won Lee Sculpture Award by the Canadian Sculpture Centre. She has participated in several art and design conferences across Canada and exhibited both locally and internationally.