Printed by sun, hand & heart
Amelia Volwiler-Stanley is the multidisciplinary artist behind PsyanoForest, a small-batch fashion line through which she primarily creates wearable cyanotypes, laser-cut jewelry, and other accessories made from fabrics printed with her hand-drawn illustrations. Blending the analogue with the digital to create her dreamy fashion pieces and accessories, AVS takes a multifaceted approach to her work, often involving multiple media in the process to create a final product.
She received her BFA from Hope College and her MFA in Sculpture, Installation Art, and Printmaking from Indiana University Bloomington, where her experience in digital fabrication gained momentum. After graduating with her MFA in 2018, AVS sought out to learn a brand new medium that would allow her to create her work anywhere she went, with studio or without — and that’s where Cyanotype photography came in. It allowed her to bring in the imagery of her woodblock relief prints and breathe life into them on cotton and linen fabrics with the power of the sun. Even further, cyanotype allowed her to expand her imagery to include botanicals, photographs, digital graphics, paintings, and drawings.
Through her works, AVS explores themes of complicated grief, trauma, and other facets of human psychology. This usually means giving image and form to what is typically unseen or even invisible, such as gut feelings and inner worlds. To AVS, these are often best understood when translated into a visceral visual medium than intellectualized through language. Volwiler-Stanley’s imagery is pulled from nature: flowers, rabbits and birds, butterfly wings, hearts and ribcages, jaw bones and hummingbirds, spider webs — all as a reminder that human experience is not so separate from the natural world. Sometimes dark, sometimes light, and most often a surreal mixture of both, AVS wants to truly feel it all through her works, which she hopes act as catalysts, talismans, and sometimes places for others to do the same.
Amelia lives and and works in Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo, Michigan. AVS has worked extensively in many media. You can see her full portfolio at www.ameliavolwilerstanley.com.
