About Amy Wike

Photo courtesy of Lukas North.

I'm a Portland, OR-based fiber artist, recently transplanted from Washington, DC, and a lifelong knitter. My work plays with the ideas of translation, interpretation, and the complexities of language. I take small nuances of speech—turns of phrase, words that have multiple meanings, and the varying ways we interpret them—and abstract them beyond recognition by translating them into Morse code and knitting the transcription row by row with yarn. The resulting amorphous shapes act as visual representations of the intricacies of communication.

I aim to create a space where visitors are challenged to think about language in a way we aren’t used to experiencing it; visually, but also tactilely. My hope is that participants find my installations approachable and disarming, while also conjuring introspective questions such as how our unique perspectives influence our interpretations and what, if anything, can be considered truly universal.

In addition to my work being exhibited in Oregon and widely in the DC area and across the Mid-Atlantic region, I have led a number of community knitting workshops, with partners including the Portland TextileX Month, Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Luce Foundation Center, The Phillips Collection, and Code for DC.