Amelia Salisbury and Derek Mueller: Out of Hollow Green Stuff Woven

“Out of Hollow Green Stuff Woven” is an exhibition reflecting two artists’ relationship with a place called Wonder Hollow. Their images document and trace the daily edges of weather, chart a pollinator’s carousel, and frame as placemats a dream soup of domestic and land-based rituals and wanderings. Together their works represent fragments of a naïve almanac; composed from a selection of uncollated pictures and page spreads. Many works are paired with textual inflections and micro essayistic filaments of narrative.

Amelia Salisbury’s works move between digital and analog processes, combining collage, paper cutting, illustration, and several types of print. They center on themes of encountering the land as a novice, and regathering the endangered knowledge and traditions of women folk in her familial lineages. Derek Mueller’s works are digital drawings, composites, and illustrations developed in Procreate. They include maps of abstracted topographies; one, above ground, in a bird’s eye view of the land; another, beneath ground, plotting the mysteries of a homemade creek-fed irrigation system. In these works, playful Wonder Hollow figures take flight, including everyday pollinators and more whose improv theater troop we’ve now joined.

Amelia Salisbury is an artist, writer, and teacher. She lives in rural Virginia with her partner, Derek, their cat—Zzala, seven rainbow trout, four garden beds, six chickens, and a farm of pet worms. Local and familial heritage, and natural environment are strong influences in her daily life and creative processes. Her recent creative work draws inspiration from her environment, ancestry, and her interests in vernacular languages, life cycles, and the health and healing of women by women. Her formal education includes a BA in Languages and Cultures of Asia, as well as two MFA’s in Creative Writing and Drawing and Painting.

For more, visit www.ameliasalisbury.com. A newcomer to the New River Valley, Derek Mueller self-describes as an untrained dabbler who practices digital art using an iPad and Procreate. He lives in Christiansburg, Va., with his partner, Amelia, and countless wilderness kin, some, like the aggressively territorial hummingbird squadron who fly sugar water routes regularly in broad daylight, and others, like the creekside possum, who shyly lumbers in, visiting infrequently at dawn's first light. In his routine work-life, Mueller teaches writing at Virginia Tech. His latest project uses imagetext for "gone-noting," or, to account for a series of gones, mysterious disappearances, and impermanences spanning personal and professional spheres. For more, visit derekmueller.net.

Image Credits: (from left to right) Derek Mueller, Peeps Who Can Read Get More Birdseed, 11 x 14 inches, digital illustration (Procreate), archival print

Amelia Salisbury, April Blanket, 11 x 15 inches, collagraph, collaged paper, India Ink, acrylic paint, cloth, and teabag.