PASSING PERSPECTIVE

Growing up in a large, busy family, Amanda Matthews ofen sought refuge in “the untouched rolling Kentucky hills” behind her home.

Tose forays into nature stirred her creativity, and she began forming landscapes of her own imagination. “I was creating natural installations, even though I didn’t know it at the time,” she said.

Tose installations have taken her from Mt. Washington, Kentucky (“It was a tiny, tiny town then; now it’s just a tiny town.”) to Roosevelt Island in Manhattan, where her bronze sculpture, “Te Girl Puzzle,” has drawn visitors and recognition from around the world since it was dedicated in December 2021. Matthews won the competition to create the monument, an ode to pioneering 19th-century investigative journalist Nellie Bly, who went undercover to write about conditions at an insane asylum on the island. “Te Girl Puzzle” depicts a group of fve massive female bronze faces and three refective spheres and is named for one of Bly’s frst published works.

But Matthews has barely had time to take a long breath since that installation. In November, her larger-than-life statue of Nettie Depp, an education reformer and sufragette who was elected superintendent of the Barren County Schools in 1913, was dedicated as the frst permanent large-scale monument of a woman in the Kentucky State Capitol.