I met Amy in 2009 when I was teaching the spring concentration at Penland school of Crafts where Amy was the Artist in Residence for Jewelry and Metalsmithing. We became fast friends and have been close ever since. Neither Amy nor I are making jewelry anymore but those shared roots created a strong bond between us. Amy went on to get her MFA at California College of Art with a concentration in Sculpture. Her work has strong formal qualities as well as a poetic nature that make it both hard and soft, intellectual and emotional, deeply researched and intuitive. These qualities create a tension in her work that makes it thought provoking as well as viscerally potent. She explores themes such as place, landscape, climate, and memory. Amy is one of the most disciplined and rigorous artists I know. She has a clear vision and well-developed ideas, so when she needs me to look at something, I take a formal approach and focus on structure, tightening up the wording, and the grammar so that her words are as clear and powerful as her work is.