Makers

Immersed in Beauty

A Minneapolis-based textile and visual artist describes finding inspiration and introspection in her warehouse studio during winter.

By Amber M. Jensen
November 16, 2023

Winter 2024

In My Studio

Free To Read

Photo by Caroline Yang

Sun streams through the window of Amber M. Jensen's studio in Minneapolis.

When I wake up in my Minneapolis home in winter, the first thing I do is peel back the bedside curtain to assess the day. Sometimes there’s a fresh blanket of white snow covering the ground and powdering the trees. If it’s very cold out, I sip my cup of hot black coffee and consider how many woolen layers I’ll need to pile on for my commute to my studio.

Having moved back to the North two years ago, after over a decade living in the rural Appalachian Mountains, I’m still getting used to the climate. I’d forgotten that just a little sun can make the day a whole lot brighter, with light reflecting off a sparkly white cloak that envelops the city.

I put on my mittens, hat, scarf, and big red puffy coat zipped all the way up. Then I slide over the icy streets of my South Minneapolis neighborhood and hop on the light-rail train that deposits me at my studio on the edge of downtown. It’s on the third floor of a towering limestone building—an appliance warehouse turned cracker factory turned art studios—which is one of the last art spaces in this once-thriving art neighborhood.

My studio is where I find my inspiration: paint on paper, threads on a loom. The feeling there seems to dictate my day, my mood wandering with the weather.

If the sun is pouring in, warming up the room, I tend to get energized, working across mediums—weaving at the loom or painting on the floor—basking in the space as the light bounces off the exposed beams in the ceiling, the bright white walls, and the worn patchwork wooden floors.

If it’s a cold, dark morning, I tend to be more inward. I make a warm herbal tea and work on something more technical, like warping a loom or prepping paper or gessoing a canvas for a new work. I like to think of the darkness as a time to prepare for the light again. I think of an interview with the poet Ruth Stone, where she described her inspiration as a thunderous train of air that runs through her. When the inspiration comes, I need to be ready for it.

Photo by Caroline Yang

At her loom textile and visual artist Amber M. Jensen weaves fine blue and ivory woolen threads into a classic Whig rose pattern.

My space energizes me, jolts me out of my cycling inner dialogue and into the action of creation. I allow myself to improvise. If something feels interesting—like a cross-stitch embroidery I made of two birds held together by a heart, where the ivory stitches turned light blue from the darkly dyed indigo ground cloth I’d embedded them into—I tack it to the wall, stand back, and squint. As I create work, I drape my art across my dress form or lay it on the floor. My studio is filled with these seemingly disparate handmade things that live next to each other, and my mission is to find connections between them. Art happens in those in-between spaces. When that occurs, it feels like magic. And if I’m patient, my work becomes timeless.

Sometimes I can live with something in my space for a whole year before it finds its way into my art—often even longer. I think this patience is really my secret ingredient when it comes to making art. I need to allow time and space for these bits to find their own way, to mystically somehow absorb more of me and my life experience, before taking their creative places. I think good art needs that. My work gains meaning after I patch together all these pieces that represent how I felt on particular days. It’s a memorial to my life as it is lived in moments.

When visitors enter my studio, I want to transport them to the fantastical world I have created in my mind. It’s a direct sensory interpretation of the world around me. I’m drawn to paper and fiber because of their delicacy. Paper and cloth are inherently fragile. They represent vulnerability and tenderness. That’s how I approach my work too.

The brick and white-painted walls of my studio are covered up to the 20-foot-high rafters in colorful handwoven cloth and large-scale drawings on paper. My goal is that a person’s whole peripheral vision is soaked in texture and color. The floor is littered with stacks of books, including even children’s books such as The Moomins and the Great Flood by the Finnish author Tove Jansson, which seems to mirror some of the struggles our world is facing today. I keep baskets of woven remnants close at hand, just waiting to find their forever home when I embed them in a new piece of artwork. The shelves are stacked with cones of yarn in gradients of hues from natural earth tones to fluorescent colors like neon pink. I keep stacks of wool-felted yardage and surplus cloth piled in baskets so high they teeter on the brink of collapse. It’s imperative to my improvisational process to have my materials and inspirations out in plain sight so that I can experiment from the moment I walk into my studio.

Photo by Caroline Yang

Jensen weaves together two of her drawings on paper.

“This is a place where I’m safeguarded from sabotage. Everything I create comes from a place of complete freedom.”

— Amber M. Jensen

It’s also very important to my process that there be a lot of open space around me, my equipment, and my materials. With so much to look at, my eye needs a lot of breathing room to absorb all of it. Spaced around the studio are several hand-me-down looms, warped up with various in-process weaving threads, and two large Scandinavian-design maple worktables, handmade by my father. The well-loved tables are now full of scratch marks, with worn indentations on the corners from the many spools of yarn wound around the winding device I clamp to them. I love the marks on the tables, as they remind me of all my projects and the countless times I’ve poured my heart out into the work over the years.

In the back by the boxes of storage are all of my dye pots, tiny jars of pigment, and jugs of vinegar that I use to paint my wool. I hand-paint my threads before adding them to the loom.

Or if I feel the cloth is in need of a more dynamic color composition, I spontaneously drip dye over the weaving after it’s been unfurled from the loom, saturating it with wet pools of color.

Weaving is a process tied to a grid. The patterns embedded in that grid often remind us of something very old and nostalgic. Something from a simpler time before mass production, made by hands rather than machines, like that well-loved blanket found in a grandmother’s attic. The grid gives a structure and form to the light and to the color that comes with it. My art can then carry that energy to other spaces across the world.

Each day I enter my studio, full of perfect, peaceful light pouring in through the old windows. This is a place where I’m safeguarded from sabotage. Everything I create comes from a place of complete freedom. My mantra is Nothing is a mistake; only opportunity lives here. This freedom allows me to be myself and bring things out from their hiding place into a physical form. This process informs the way I see and hear the world, and reinforces my ultimate purpose.

My life’s work is to create beauty. I love beauty’s quiet power. I am an activist for beauty. My protest is a prayer for a world set aflame by beauty. The writer bell hooks saw beauty as a virtue not reserved for art, but rather abundant in the everyday and the natural world. Hooks celebrated “the insistence that elegance and ecstasy are to be found in daily life, in our habits of being, in the ways we regard one another and the world around us.”

Beauty pulls at our heartstrings. It helps us sift through the clutter, grab hold of the darkness and destroy it like nothing else can. And when darkness is lifted, joy can spread. It multiplies. It expands. It gets into the shadowy corners and burns them clean.

I spend a lot of my time listening and watching. I aim to quietly bring light and beauty to this loud world. My devotion is to the humble piece of handwoven cloth. It’s my offering.

Amber M. Jensen is a painter, textile artist, and teacher working out of her downtown Minneapolis studio. Her work is an invitation for viewers to join her in a fantastical world of imagination that’s grounded in the often elusive sense of place, home, and shelter.

Photo by Caroline Yang

Jensen unfurls woven wool yardage from her loom.

Photo by Caroline Yang

Jensen at her loom weaving cloth for a series of new artworks. To her right are baskets of cloth and a wearable woven coat. On the wall are her woven, quilted, and embroidered pieces.

Photo by Caroline Yang

A basket full of weaving tools, embroideries, quilt squares, and handwoven cloth waits to be incorporated into future textile artworks.

Photo by Caroline Yang

Amber M. Jensen pins a small painted sketch of an imaginary landscape to her inspiration wall. Here, the artist weaves together two of her drawings on paper.

Photo by Caroline Yang

Amber M. Jensen pins a small painted sketch of an imaginary landscape to her inspiration wall. Here, the artist weaves together two of her drawings on paper.

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Visit Amber M. Jensen's website and Instagram.

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This article was made possible with support from the Windgate Foundation.

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