Amelia Rosenberg ( she/her )

My artwork is a reckoning. Through ceramics I engage with my understanding of self, holding a mirror to my German Jewish family’s survival through WWII. Personal and collective memory is deconstructed through imagery of flora and fauna found in Bavarian folk textiles once produced by my great grandfather Moritz and his brothers Julius and Max. The textiles, steeped in symbol and craft, serve as cultural preservation - capturing the essence of a place now marked by profound loss.

I employ animals such as goats, geese, and rabbits. These folk creatures epitomize automatic responses and illustrate human reactions as very animal and instinctual. Through sculptural narratives I consider personal hardships and find tethers between my intrinsic reactions and the lived fears of my family. Horns, webbed feet, and long ears draw parallels to the body’s own mechanisms for survival: the fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses. In their animalistic and symbolic form, I bridge my experience with universal themes of resilience and vulnerability - connecting individual grief to a broader cultural narrative. 

I acknowledge the reverence in survival and consider growth a companion to fear. An abundance of plant-like representations pay homage to the kinship between grief and reclamation, a testament to the healing that often follows survival. My personal encounter with hardship has resulted in a path towards compassion, understanding, and joy. Through the creation of this artwork, I work to understand how close we are, and ask “what does it mean to belong?”

Amelia’s ceramic art sits at the intersection of storytelling, lineage, and the natural world. She is Assistant Professor of Ceramics at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. In 2021 she co-founded the Wallach Project, a German nonprofit organization that provides a platform for the education, preservation, and reimagination of Jewish folk craft and history within Bavaria. Amelia received her BFA in Ceramics from the University of North Carolina Asheville and her MFA from the University of Iowa. Amelia has completed residencies in Germany, France, and the United States and has shown work across the US and Europe.