Adiskidan Ambaye was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where she lived until sixteen. Ambaye then moved to Frankfurt, Germany to study, before moving again four years later to Minnesota to study fine art at MCAD, specialising in furniture design. For Ambaye, sculpture and drawing are deeply interwoven. The abstract sculptures she produces are nearly always preceded by gestural two-dimensional sketches, which delineate the foundations for her three-dimensional compositions.
The wooden sculptures appear moulded from a single block of wood but are actually composed of as many as sixty handcrafted smaller slices of plywood. The ringed markings orbiting the surface of each segment represent an individual piece fused to form the whole. Ambaye has described this process as sculpting 'from the inside out.' These cyclical markings also conjure images of the naturally occurring concentric circles found in trees, signifying age and mortality, visible only once the tree has been cut down.
By sanding the rough and brittle surface, Ambaye can rid it of blemishes, or 'erase' them as she could do in her sketches, like an eraser with pencil marks. Colour is added through the aid of a blow torch, darkening the wood to a colour reminiscent of a tree’s bark. She wields the blowtorch like a pencil as she shades sections of the work. Rising upward and contorting into seemingly impossible angles, the sculptures evoke emotions and life stories made manifest. Nevertheless, Ambaye clarifies that this is not the perception she seeks to impose. Rather, she refrains from directing interpretation, inviting viewers instead to project their own judgments onto the work.
Ambaye has exhibited across the USA and internationally in select group and solo shows, including African Women (2001), World Space Centre, Washington DC, Colour of Africa (2001), Portland, Maine, Chicago Museum of Industrial design (2007), Chicago, Africa by Design (2017), Ghana.