Themes of domesticity and interior life pervade Amy Boone-McCreesh’s oeuvre, from her three-dimensional works on paper to her hanging sculptures to her installation art. When beginning a piece, Boone-McCreesh doesn’t plan the composition. She simply takes inspiration from the material objects around her, trying to understand why certain arrangements of those objects appeal to her. “Usually there is at least one anchor that drives a piece forward,” she says, such as a window or a chair in a piece. “But much of the process is intuitive and really material, texture, and composition-based.”
Boone-McCreesh’s works on paper appear painterly from a distance, their texture becoming more and more apparent as each delicate layer builds upon the next. “Rather than forcing works on paper to be flat, I let them take on the visual vocabulary I would use in more sculptural work,” she says. “When they have sculptural elements, they can exist in a more objective, real-world context.” Her effervescent and bright color palette also probes the idea of domesticity, questioning why we see certain interior spaces as feminine or masculine. And as an artist working in the realm of craft, the interior spaces that she depicts also contain loaded associations with how women artists are conceived of in the art world. “Women making any work that is decorative also gets put into this realm of domesticity,” she says.
