Amy Revier

Amy Revier grew up in Austin, Texas and received a BFA in Fine Art and Art History from The Algur H. Meadows School of the Arts. Whilst studying, she was awarded a grant to travel to Oaxaca to study backstrap weaving, where she honed her interest in the practice and received a grant for a floor loom. In 2009, Revier travelled to Iceland under The Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program where she developed sculpture and textiles in relation to her time living there.

With the support of Blue Mountain School after moving to London, in 2013 Revier produced her first collection of garments from her own textiles, and has since continued to develop one-off bodies of work that draw from a wide range of references across textile history and literature for the Hostem Archive.

For Frieze Week in 2014, Blue Mountain School presented Later Alone She Wore Poems for Clothes, an installation by Revier in which she performed in store for one week, inviting guests to encounter the varied and intensive stages of the immersive practice of weaving.

In 2016, Revier developed an ongoing body of work entitled The Silent Traveller, a pairing of traveller’s clothes and traveller’s memoirs. The linen suit sets are soft uniforms, intended for sleep, play, working or exploring in, for both mental or physical travel. As more pairings are introduced, the project will grow over time as an ongoing library of uniforms and books. The editions have been inspired by Joan Newhouse’s memoir Reindeers are Wild Too (1954), which details the author’s time spent travelling with a nomadic tribe and their reindeer across the desolate mountains and fjords of northern Norway and Finland, and the endearing memoir A Silent Traveller in Japan (1972) by Chiang Yee, which combines his observations and watercolour studies made over four visits to Japan to capture each season.

During Frieze Week in 2019, Blue Mountain School presented an installation of new work by Revier entitled Connected, Doubled, Reversed, Revealed, Concealed. The series comprised handmade cashmere coats built by doubleweave on the loom using an intensive process new to Revier’s practice to create fully reversible worlds. The top layer is woven consciously by sight, while the under layer is woven blindly by intuitive touch and revealed only after it is removed from the loom. Revier is interested in the relationship between text and textile and the translation of the articulated into feeling and movement, creating crossovers in checks, stripes, and single plains of colour to explore how we come to know things through the hand and the act of making.

Revier recently presented new work as part of Common Thread at The New Art Centre. The exhibition brought together a group of artists each of whose work focuses on the history of textile technology and design, and their shifting values for people across place and time. Exploring the ways which certain textile producing technologies are still in effect while others are being challenged, the works in the exhibition reflected on the place of textiles both in art, and in contemporary society.

Revier works single-handedly from her studio in North London, weaving one of a kind textiles and garments for Blue Mountain School on a traditional wooden floor loom. She meticulously selects hand-dyed yarns sourced from across the globe, spending weeks working with spun material, taking it from thread to textile to garment. Revier develops her textiles intuitively with careful attention given to the act of weaving itself, deciding the final shape as she weaves and allows it to come to life.