Amy Rusch: Where Sailing, Archaeology and Material Meet

Amy Rusch's work begins with things that carry traces.

A piece of sailcloth records wind. A plastic bag records consumption. Sediment holds evidence of an ancient landscape. Thread records the movement of a hand and the passage of time. Across her practice, the Cape Town-based artist brings these materials together to explore movement, sound, memory, geology and the relationship between human time and the much larger timescales of the natural world.

Rusch works across textile art, sculpture, drawing and mixed media, but no single category adequately describes her practice. She uses sewing as a form of drawing, salvaged materials as a kind of archive and physical experience as a source for abstraction. Sailing and archaeology provide two of her most important points of reference, giving her work a strong connection to both the ocean and the ancient landscapes of South Africa.

Her growing reputation received a significant boost in 2026 when she won the inaugural Materiality Prize at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair, presented in partnership with Homo Faber. The award recognised precisely the quality that defines her practice: the way she turns material and making into the subject of the work itself.

A practice shaped by sailing and archaeology

Rusch's background helps explain why her work moves so naturally between sea, landscape and material history.

Her experience of sailing has informed works concerned with wind, water, navigation and movement. She has crossed the South Atlantic by boat, and that experience appears in works that translate the changing conditions of a voyage into line and form. Her archaeological experience offers an entirely different scale of reference. Excavation introduces questions of sediment, layers, traces and deep time. Together, these experiences give her a vocabulary that moves between the immediate and the ancient.

Her work does not illustrate those experiences in a straightforward way.

Instead, she translates them.

A sailing experience can become a contour drawing. Wind can become a stitched line. Sediment can become a pattern. An archaeological landscape can become an abstract field of colour.

Rusch describes this approach as a form of vibrational translation. Her work brings together sound, movement, line and colour rather than simply representing a particular object or landscape.

That distinction matters when looking at her art. A work might initially appear abstract, but its abstraction often has a specific physical origin.

Plastic as a record of contemporary life

Found plastic remains one of the most recognisable elements of Rusch's work.

She began collecting plastic bags as a young person and later started deliberately experimenting with them as an artistic material. She noticed that no two bags look exactly alike. Their colours, folds, transparency, printing and distortions give each one a different visual character.

Rusch does not simply recycle the bags into another object.

She cuts, flattens, heats, gathers, binds and layers them before stitching into the resulting surface. The process changes the material. Plastic buckles and pulls against the thread. Stitching creates tension. Layers reveal colours that would otherwise remain hidden.

The sewing machine becomes particularly important here.

Rusch uses it less like a conventional textile tool and more like a drawing instrument. Instead of placing thread neatly into a predetermined pattern, she allows movement, rhythm and physical response to guide the marks. The machine produces a physical and audible process, while the plastic records its consequences.

This creates an interesting contradiction.

Plastic represents speed, convenience and mass consumption. Rusch subjects it to slow, repetitive labour. A material designed for brief use becomes the surface of an artwork that demands sustained attention.

That tension sits at the centre of her practice.

Thread carries its own history.

The thread matters as much as the plastic.

Rusch has incorporated inherited fibres from members of her family, including threads passed down through several generations of women. These materials introduce a personal history into works that otherwise deal with enormous subjects such as geology, archaeology and environmental change.

Thread therefore performs two roles.

It creates the visible drawing, but it also carries memory.

A single line can connect an artist to her family while simultaneously becoming part of a larger investigation into time. The material moves from domestic and familial history into contemporary art.

This gives the work a quiet intimacy.

The plastic may suggest a global environmental problem, while the thread can point towards an individual life. Rusch brings those scales together rather than treating them as separate concerns.

When sewing becomes drawing

Rusch's stitched works often look more like drawings or paintings than traditional embroidery.

Some form dense fields of colour. Others contain sparse lines that resemble maps, geological contours or diagrams. The viewer can read them from a distance as abstract compositions and then discover the individual stitches when standing close to the surface.

That change of scale forms an important part of the experience.

From far away, the work can appear unified.

Up close, it becomes fragmented into thousands of individual actions.

This makes time visible.

Every stitch represents a small amount of labour. Thousands of stitches transform that labour into a larger image. Rusch has described the hours spent stitching as a process that helps her clarify her thoughts.

The resulting artwork therefore contains both the finished image and the process that created it.

This also explains why critics often resist describing her work simply as textile art. The sewing technique matters, but the work extends beyond craft classification. The found plastic, the movement of the machine and the references to sound, archaeology and landscape give the pieces a conceptual and sculptural dimension.

Ocean Contours and the memory of movement

The ocean provides one of Rusch's clearest sources of imagery.

Her Ocean Contours series grew from her experience of crossing the South Atlantic. Rather than producing a conventional seascape, Rusch translated the physical experience of being on the water into contour and movement.

The works suggest maps without functioning as maps.

They do not give the viewer a precise route. Instead, they evoke navigation, instability and changing perspective.

This approach appears elsewhere in her work. Rusch has described her pieces as mappings or tracings of sensory experiences. The artwork does not reproduce an event. It retains something from the experience of moving through it.

Her use of sailcloth pushes this idea further.

Rusch has worked with sail material by laying it flat and stitching the marks left by wind. The resulting pieces record physical forces that normally disappear as soon as the wind stops.

In these works, nature effectively becomes part of the drawing process.

Wind creates the original marks. The artist translates those marks through stitching. The finished work preserves a trace of an interaction between material and environment.

Archaeology and deep time

Archaeology gives Rusch's work another way to think about traces.

Her involvement with archaeological projects has included making display replicas of important archaeological material from sites in South Africa. Her artistic practice draws on this knowledge of excavation, artefacts and geological layers.

One of her strongest recent connections to archaeology came through the Nama Karoo in the Northern Cape.

Her 2026 work, What arrives with first light, and the goodness of silence, developed from early-morning walks with her father to the Kurukop archaeological site. She has described travelling through the landscape before sunrise, watching the light change and listening as the sounds of night gave way to the sounds of morning.

The finished work uses found plastic and thread.

That combination creates a powerful contrast.

The archaeological site connects to ancient human presence and geological time. Plastic belongs to an industrial and consumer culture that has emerged only recently. Rusch places these materials in the same visual field.

The result does not offer a simple environmental message. It asks the viewer to consider how different forms of time coexist.

Sediment, plastic and 60,000 years

Rusch pushes this investigation even further in Sedimentary Wayfinding.

For one work in the series, she used sediment associated with archaeological material from Klasies River Mouth. She worked with material connected to deposits dating back around 60,000 years, rolling thousands of tiny sedimentary forms between her fingers before incorporating them into the work.

Here, the contrast with plastic becomes almost impossible to ignore.

Archaeological sediment can preserve evidence of early human life for tens of thousands of years. A plastic bag represents a contemporary culture built around short-term use and disposal.

Rusch brings the two together.

The plastic becomes more than a recycled material. It becomes a surface through which she can consider the relationship between contemporary human behaviour and deep geological and archaeological time.

This gives her work an unusual sense of scale.

A small stitched mark can refer simultaneously to the movement of a needle, the experience of an artist, the history of a material and the vastness of geological time.

Sound, vibration and the physical act of making

Sound does not appear visually in Rusch's work, yet it remains important to understanding it.

The sewing machine produces rhythm and vibration. The needle moves repeatedly through the layered plastic. The artist's body responds to that movement. The resulting surface becomes a physical record of an activity that originally involved sound.

Rusch has described her works as "sound drawings" and "fields of energy". She sees the repeated marks as a way of translating experiences that do not naturally exist as static images.

Her work Wind Transcription A connecting point I, for example, translates marks left on sailcloth by wind and the interactions between the cloth, vegetation, earth and stones. The final work uses found plastic bags and thread to carry that experience into another material language.

This process gives her practice a distinctive physical quality.

The viewer sees the result, but the artwork also points back towards the actions that produced it.

The significance of the 2026 Materiality Prize

Rusch's 2026 Materiality Prize matters because it recognises the central role of making in her work.

The inaugural prize at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair, presented in partnership with Homo Faber, placed Rusch within a broader international conversation about contemporary craft, material knowledge and artisanal practice. She received an invitation to participate in the Homo Faber Fellowship Masterclass in Venice, an eight-month programme focused on craft, design and the transmission of making skills.

The recognition also reflects a wider shift in contemporary art.

Artists increasingly use craft techniques without treating craft as separate from conceptual practice. Rusch embodies that shift. Her ideas do not sit above the making process. They emerge through it.

The material does not merely carry the concept.

The material is the concept.

Amy Rusch's place in contemporary South African art

Rusch's practice stands out because it connects several areas that artists often approach separately: textile art, environmental material, contemporary craft, archaeology, sailing, sound and abstraction.

Her work also draws attention to South Africa's particular relationship with deep time. The country's archaeological record, rock art, geological landscapes and coastline provide more than scenery. They provide sources of knowledge and ways of thinking.

Rusch responds to those places through physical experience.

She sails. She excavates. She collects. She listens. She stitches.

Those actions become the basis for artworks that can look abstract while remaining rooted in specific encounters with the world.

That is perhaps the most compelling aspect of her work. The abstraction never completely loses its connection to reality.

A line might come from wind.

A colour might come from plastic.

A pattern might recall sediment.

A surface might contain inherited thread.

A stitched field might carry the memory of an archaeological landscape.

Rusch turns these fragments into works that ask viewers to slow down and look closely.

In an art world often dominated by images that demand immediate attention, her work rewards patience. The longer you look, the more layers emerge.

Plastic becomes history.

Thread becomes drawing.

Sewing becomes sound.

Landscape becomes memory.

And the present becomes another layer in a much longer record of human activity.