In a fast-paced world full of productivity mindsets and hustle culture, local artist Amy Koch offers us something gentler: a reminder of our inner child and ability to dream. Her art is a playful experiment in storytelling told in mixed-media odds and ends, and it is simply impossible to resist.
Amy’s mom was a fabric artist, and she traces her love for paper directly back to her mom. She liked playing with fabrics for their endless textures and colors, which is exactly what made her fall in love with paper. Though she experimented with different materials over the years, she always found herself returning to paper. As a girl, Amy took her school art projects above and beyond. She remembers making a 4-foot tall paper mache swatch watch piñata for a middle school Spanish project.
“The joy she infuses into her creations quite simply radiates off of them.”
After working as a sculptor and later experimenting with collage on canvas, Amy began creating shadowboxes while traveling for art shows as a way to keep her delicate canvases safe. “A lot of my journey has been full of happy accidents or little ideas that led me to something else,” she tells me. Shadowboxes offer a way to keep the pieces self-contained and protected, and their depth allowed her to begin playing with “three dimensionality and lightweightness, like dangling paper stars, and that’s when everything really came together.” Influenced in part by theater, her compositions began to feel like tiny stages. Her pieces often look like snapshots of greater scenes, with characters momentarily frozen in time along their grand adventures.
This narrative quality draws people in. At shows, Amy watches visitors step into her booth and visibly soften. “They’ll start giggling and pointing at the little details that grab them,” she says. “Some people cry, too.”
Her pieces tap into something universally personal and familiar. Her process feels like an uninhibited dedication to creative play—gluing, cutting, painting, pasting, and sculpting with bits of twigs, tin foil, fabric, string, paper, and more. The result is both innocent and imaginative, and her finished pieces communicate these feelings perfectly. The joy she infuses into her creations quite simply radiates off of them.
“When you’re a kid, you can run around in ridiculous outfits and sing in public, and people think it’s cute,” she says. “Why are you crazy if you do that as an adult?”
It’s a question that sits at the heart of her work, I think. Amy is interested in expressive freedom—something we often lose touch with as we age. She wants to remind us of those feelings and encourage us to reconnect with imagination, absurdity and joy.
These interactions give Amy the motivation to keep traveling for festivals. Having recently moved to Evergreen from Saint Louis, her circuit now stretches into Texas, and she hopes to add shows in Idaho and Utah this year. The quality of the festival, in Amy’s eyes, is determined by the quality of conversation. When people are curious and take their time, Amy has more fun. She sees traveling for her art as a beautiful privilege and constant inspiration. When her sons were younger, she often took them to her shows, turning them into opportunities to explore new places together. Art shows also allow Amy to demonstrate her art in person and show off their kinetic features, like delicate dangling stars that flutter in the breeze, three-dimensional tree houses connected to suspended bridges, and layered scenes that shift as you look closer.
One of my questions for Amy was about her very bookish theme. Not only does she use paper as a primary medium (old books, magazines, maps, and more), but she also builds tiny bookshelves filled with dozens of miniature colorful paper books. “It’s mostly reflective about the time you spend reading with your kids when they’re little,” she explains. Her kids always wanted to read the same story over and over every night, and she loved watching their eyes light up as their imaginations went wild. Children’s books continue to inspire her work as she aims to capture familiar feelings of wonder and fantasy through repeated motifs of her favorite things, like treehouses, ships and dogs. She leans into what she loves and lets the rest follow. Nature is also a constant source of inspiration, and Amy is conscious about using recycled and natural materials. In nature, “everything’s inspirational,” she says.
Amy recently moved to Evergreen, and has been actively weaving herself into the arts community here. Right before moving, she entered a piece into Center for the Arts Evergreen’s juried exhibition Oh, The Places You’ll Go!. “I saw the theme and thought, this is me! It was perfect timing, and the exhibition made so much sense for my work,” she gushes. “And then, to win an award… it was such a great welcome into the community.”
This summer, Amy will be showing her work at a few local festivals, where you can view her magical mini worlds in person.
—Summerfest: July 18 & 19
—Evergreen Fine Arts Festival: August 22 & 23
Check out Amy on Instagram at @paperloftcreations for more glimpses!
