Made with sun, hand & heart
Psyano Forest is the wearable art studio of Amelia Volwiler-Stanley, where fashion is a vessel for memory, myth, and emotional restoration. Each piece is made through a layered, intuitive process that combines analogue and digital methods—cyanotype, hand-drawn illustration, digital photography, and laser CNC cutting—woven together with precision, experimentation, and care.
At its heart, Psyano Forest is a reclamation practice. Discarded clothing, vintage textiles, and post-consumer materials are gathered, dismantled, and transformed into treasurable wearables—garments that speak not only to the eye but to the inner landscape. Many pieces incorporate custom fabrics printed from original illustrations and collaged imagery, while others use sculptural elements cut from acrylic and found materials, blurring the boundary between adornment and artifact.
Recurring themes in Amelia’s work include trauma, grief, psychological complexity, and the radical joy that can emerge through re-engagement with life. Her visual language is rooted in nature—flowers, bones, birds, hearts, and hybrid creatures—alongside anatomical forms and dream-logic symbology. These images become portals to deeper reflection, often offering the wearer not only beauty, but protection.
Psyano Forest garments are meant to be worn like spells: acts of defiance, celebration, remembrance, and re-enchantment. They are made to be felt as much as they are seen.
Amelia Volwiler-Stanley (AVS) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her creative path began at age 15 in her grandmother’s sewing room, where she first fell in love with garment making. Though her practice has since spanned sculpture, installation, printmaking, digital fabrication, and cyanotype photography, fashion remains her first artistic language—and she’s now returned to it with renewed purpose.
AVS holds a BFA from Hope College and an MFA from Indiana University Bloomington, where her work in sculpture, installation, and printmaking was shaped by digital processes. After graduating in 2018, she embraced cyanotype as a portable, light-based medium that allowed her to translate woodblock imagery onto fabric, later expanding to include botanicals, photographs, paintings, and digital graphics.
Her work explores complicated grief, trauma, and unseen psychological states—often turning to visceral, nature-based imagery like flowers, bones, birds, and spider webs to connect human emotion with the natural world. Surreal, tender, and sometimes haunting, her pieces act as talismans, catalysts, or quiet places of reflection for both artist and viewer.
Explore her evolving portfolio at www.ameliavolwilerstanley.com.