Professor Letha Kelsey introduced Amy Fichter’s Artist Talk on Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2022. Kelsey introduced Fichter as a UW-Stout professor from Menominee, Wisconsin. Fichter works in multiple media sources but is a classically trained figure drawing artist. Fichter came to UW-Platteville to give her Artist Talk following the exhibition, “The Figure in Multiple Dimensions,” that she participated in at the Nohr gallery. 

Fichter began her talk, “There is a Heaviness,” by reflecting on Käthe Kollwitz. Fichter shared with the gathered art students that when she was going through school, she found the great masters to be “dry.” 

Around this time, Fichter found Kollwitz’s art extremely relatable as a woman and also as a mother. Then, Fichter’s Artist Talk fell into three distinct sections as she began to show students her work.

The overarching message of Fichter’s artwork was how “there is a heaviness” in the human body. The first section of Fichter’s talk focused on the art she made earliest in her career with this message in mind. 

Fichter began showing some of her drawn work that highlighted different areas of the body. The first work was titled “Breasts” and was a self-portrait that encapsulated the weight and responsibility that Fichter felt while she was approaching motherhood. She was also able to describe through the color and structure of the composition how she saw pregnancy and the correlating act of creation as magical. By using ethereal colors and dramatic posing, Fichter was able to portray her body with the magic that she saw within. 

Fichter then showed a large portrait of her own parents. This portrait showed them as they were. Fichter described them as common, but with the drawing style used, Fichter was able to portray her parents as royalty and people of importance while still highlighting the things that were ordinary about them, such as their scars.

Fichter then began the second section of her talk. This part of her work was broken up by the birth of her son. Fichter explained that she struggled to work in the studio and give her child the attention he needed, so she turned to photography. By beginning the use of photography to capture “ordinary days,” Fichter was able to include her son in her work. She explained that she did not see photography as a separate medium, but as “drawing with the camera.” 

During this part of the presentation, Fichter pointed out that her work during this time period had a sense of foreboding that she felt during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. She had constructed a sense of vulnerability in her photographed work and showed students examples of what she called “quiet images.” 

These photographs included topics of climate change, old and overlooked objects, as well as evenings, which Fichter described as “what stops here and what’s beyond.”

The final section of Fichter’s presentation focused on the state of depression she found herself in during the COVID-19 pandemic. She began working with woodcut printing at the request of a colleague, which allowed her to get back into the studio. 

Fichter wanted to honor Kollwitz as a subject, and fell in love with the mark-making of printmaking while making Kollwitz’s portrait. Her second woodblock piece was an image of two women seen carrying the weight of the world’s burdens. They bore it together as they worked and moved into the unknown. 

Fichter commented that depending on how the audience chose to see the gravity acting upon the figures, they could be portrayed to be either picking up or setting down the burdens beheld by the world.

Fichter’s Artist Talk left students with several questions to ask. Many of them were interested in Fichter’s photography work, but some had other questions about her printmaking. 

This Artist Talk allowed the university’s art students and otherwise the chance to see an artist’s work taking on an overarching message across multiple mediums. From this example, students and audience members alike can begin to think about how their own life experiences can impact the work they will make within their lifetime.