Local artist helps shape IU campus

When she isn’t working on her own limestone sculpture pieces, local artist Amy Brier is spending her time doing commissioned work around Bloomington. \nThis June, Brier will participate in the 12th annual Limestone Symposium in Bloomington at the Bybee Stone Company. The workshop is held through the John Waldron Arts Center. It is a three-week program in which participants get to sculpt and carve their own works of art out of stone. \n“To me it’s just as much of being an artist, because I’m facilitating all these people who just love to be out there banging on stone,” Brier said.\nRecently, Brier assisted in the completion of the carvings inside IU’s Simon Hall, which opened in October 2007. While she did not carve the pieces herself, she made life-size clay models that the carvers could reference. \nIn the creative process, Brier worked with biology professor Elizabeth Raffto to come up with the proper symbols for the inside of the building.\n“The theme is what IU is known for in the life science research, and so it’s an E. coli, ink cap mushroom, a fly, a mouth, an ear of corn and a paramecium,” she said. \nBrier currently teaches 2-D design and 3-D design studio art classes at Ivy Tech and will also collaborate with Ivy Tech to bring some limestone pieces to its campus. In the fall, she and an international carver will begin work on sculpting limestone pieces that will ultimately remain on campus in an event called “The Limestone Duet.”\nBrier said she has been carving limestone for some time now and it is her favorite material to work with.\n“I like it because it’s soft and I can work it by hand. And I like the fact that it’s very uniform looking; so that when people look at it they’re not looking at a beautiful piece of stone, they’re looking at the shape that it’s been carved into,” she said. “I like to carve really is what it is. So I enjoy the process and that’s kind of what keeps me going.” \nShe said she carves what inspires her, such as scenes of nature and western culture. She has even developed her own interactive artistic process called “roliquery.” Brier carves a design into limestone balls and when rolled in sand, the limestone carving leaves the imprints behind. She has carved everything from snowflakes to koi fish into these balls, which can also be cast into bronze or other materials.\nBrier plans to create one of her roliquery pieces in sand for Ivy Tech.\n“I always knew I wanted to be an artist, and I come from a family where that was encouraged, so that was good,” Brier said. \nBrier was born in 1960 and raised in Providence, R.I., surrounded by a loving and nurturing family, she said. She received her degree from Boston University’s College of Fine Arts in 1982 and then studied abroad in Cortona, Italy, through the University of Georgia.\nWhen Brier began to consider graduate school, IU’s School of Fine Arts and the state’s reputation for limestone drew her to Bloomington.\n“When I decided I wanted to go to grad school, this was just the logical place because of the combination of the good university and my favorite stone,” Brier said.