Amber Dohrenwend is an American artist based in Marquette, Michigan. She constructs post-consumer cardboard sculptures, costuming and installations with soft, organic curves and textures. Her work directs viewers’ attention to the vast potential of a humble material that is often overlooked. She often works with nothing more than cardboard, a pair of scissors and a stapler.
Why Cardboard?
I started using cardboard as a medium in a variety of different contexts. I realized, cardboard is everywhere. It’s free and it’s infinitely interesting to me. There aren’t many materials that everyone has that kind of access to anymore. People used to be able to just go out and gather the things they needed to make their clothes, shelter, furniture, or even to make art. Cardboard is one of the few things we all can go out and collect.
How does your work differ from others in its genre?
One notable thing is my environment. Japan has had a profound influence on me. I grew up on a farm with lots of space and things and materials around. Japan has made me appreciate a more paired down kind of beauty and way of living.
Another, I think, is the way I see cardboard. I think it’s somewhere on a continuum between leather and wood depending on how you treat it, but it also has its own unique properties, like being extremely lightweight, having directional strength and a hollow core. I like the raw edges when you tear it. I like how it looks when it’s slightly crumpled, I love the many many shades of brown.
When I think of working with cardboard, my initial response is to bend it. Bent cardboard reveals textures and shows the mark of the person who touched it. In this way cardboard is transformed from a flat, lifeless material into something much warmer and more alive. This is how I see a pile of boxes, as material waiting to be transformed.
I’m also attracted to cardboard as a way of subverting consumerism.
To me it’s a symbol of resilience; to take something that others have discarded, and make something beautiful.
Inquiries: adohrenwend@gmail.com