the year my heart turned to water
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I was born in the Ozarks, a land of valleys dressed up in the linguistic drag of mountains. We are not held by peaks but by a network of hollers, creeks, and caves—formed by water’s slow and silent insistence.
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the year my heart turned to water is a meditation on erosion as both disappearance and creation. The land I come from was carved into being by absence, by removal, by the fluid, persistent touch of water. This work asks: what if softness was not failure but form? What if what is worn away reveals what is most sacred?
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The photographs in this exhibition are printed on layered textiles—cotton and chiffon—so they mirror how memory moves: in loops and slippages, in things half-seen through mist. I’ve used thread as a tool for drawing and undoing, for writing and unraveling, so the image hovers, distorts, slips between presence and absence. In high humidity, the camera doesn’t just record; it breathes. Queer presence, like mist—not erased, but diffused—atmospheric—echoes the tension between legacy and longing.
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This is not a call for visibility, but for embodiment. Landscape here is not subject but collaborator—a site where bodies dissolve into fog, and desire is sedimentary, layered into the folds of place—accumulating across time, into the topography itself. In the humid stillness of dusk, queerness pulses beneath the surface, reshaping the land in silence like an underground spring.
This body of work began as a whisper—soft but insistent—asking how queerness lives in a region that refuses to name it. I grew up off-grid and half-feral, surrounded by a culture where identity and language were tightly patrolled. But water taught me how to bubble beneath limestone—how to flow, how to elude, how to carve, and how to seduce even the hardest stone to let go.
This work is a devotion to the whisper of water, and a turning toward the land that continues to hold me.
About Amber Imrie
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Amber Imrie (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work weaves personal narrative, place-based memory, and poetic introspection. Raised off-the-grid in the Ozark Mountains, their early life was shaped by solitude, land, and an unconventional education. Imrie holds a BA from UC Berkeley and an MFA from Stanford, where they received multiple awards. Their practice spans sculpture, photography, installation, and writing, often exploring emotional and environmental erosion. Imrie is the founder of Venison Magazine and Camp Venison, and has exhibited nationally and internationally. They are a founding member of The Alternative Art School and are based in Fayetteville, AR.