Amy Bird
Artist Statement
Using U.S. currency as a medium, my art asks questions about value and values, worth and worthiness. What is essential and what is inessential? Why can the bottom line seem more real than anything else? Money is such a potent force in society that I see benefit in thinking through it rather than going around it. I cut up money to better understand it and myself.
The process I use to deconstruct/reconstruct currency and the transformed pieces that result are both essential to my work. Each collage is created from a single U.S. dollar bill. No more, and also no less.
Committing to these formal constraints – ‘no more’ and ‘no less’ – is my way of actively contemplating two transformative ideas:
It’s possible to respect material limits and also have enough.
Every part of the whole matters.
It can take hundreds of hours over many months to complete a single piece. It’s not only the dollar bill that is changed. I am changed.
As I slowly and consciously remove a dollar bill from circulation, I think about the many intentional decisions at all levels – government, business and individual – that determine how money flows or stagnates, how it can strengthen connections between people and every other part of the living world or rupture them. I wonder if cutting up money is illegal in part because it challenges the myth that the current economic system is immutable. We can – we must – imagine other possibilities.
Paying close attention to an ordinary dollar bill is good grounding for those imaginings. Money is an abstract idea, yet a dollar bill is made from plants whose roots once reached into the earth and who grew and flowered by the gifts of sunlight, air and rain. I find inspiration in this generative tension between the intangible and the embodied.
I recognize that every person has a different money story and that many of us hold these stories in deep and tender places. I strive to share my work in a way that respects and values these differences, inviting reflection and open conversation.
Bio
Amy Bird is a self-taught mixed media artist who made her first cut currency collage in 2019. She lives and practices in Tempe, serves on the Board of Directors of Local First Arizona and is employed as a Lending Manager for a national social finance nonprofit. Her art has been displayed at the Shemer Art Center and the Franciscan Renewal Center.
@amy.bird.art