Exhibition
Selected Media
Blouin ArtInfo
Join us on Wednesday 7 November
from 6-8pm for the opening of
Stevie Fieldsend’s latest solo exhibition hereafter.
Irrespective of her medium, whether glass, wood or textile, Stevie Fieldsend’s art is visceral; it is vested in flesh and blood, born of her lived experience and her subconscious; redolent of the life force, of mystery, angst, desire. Her works are maternal, matriarchal, spawned, connected, morphing, giving birth to each other.
“I don’t start my work with an intellectual premise or a fixed concept it begins more with a daydreaming or a starting point of doing something around – say fantasy – which summons particular materials and repetitive gestural patterns. My mind offers up ideas and my body and gut decide which way to go – but it’s a balance rather than any one leading force – I guess my work is process driven and relies on curiosity, experimentation and resonance.
It’s a way to express physiological sensations that are not captured in words – a response that is pre-verbal. The interwoven strands are the female body, the life force and cycles of life and death, fantasy, disassociation, profound grief and wonder… All my work is deeply personal and this new body of work is no exception.”
Textiles, fluid, finely-pleated synthetic fabric and fleshy stretch stockings form the hereafter works:
“My favourite thing about working with a new material is finding out its secrets, its ways of being – I feel like I have been invited into its world – it’s an intense relationship with the material – this dialogue of intent, gestural actions; of reacting, of pushing it to its limits, of responding to its possibilities, the pull of gravity and the way it falls and of failing and of triumph. For me materiality informs the concept as much as the concept informs the materiality – it’s a symbiotic process and I believe the material I use is always a reflection of my emotional state…
Any material I use needs to capture my wonder, it has to keep surprising me – if I am in complete control – I lose interest real fast, a bit like a cat with its prey. I need it to go in directions that I hadn’t foreseen and also let it have its god-damn say – and tell me something that I didn’t know!
The artist describes an alchemical and cathartic experience in the creating of works for hereafter:
“It conveys a feeling of exceeding boundaries, of being out of the body, the fissures between internal and external. The sensation of being pulled out of myself, the inside becoming outside. A maturation process in flux…
The resultant works show my psychic space. It makes sense and brings meaning to my world. It tells me my story, both conscious and unconscious through the act of making, of bodily gesture; aspects of curiosity, imagination and materiality. I create my own personal magical alternate world where rules don’t apply, everything is possible and there’s a sense of timelessness. I get to return to the curious kid in me and play. And it’s this magical intersection of when daydreams become reality that reality is transformed to a limitless landscape of possibilities.”
Integral to my work is a sense of movement, a feeling of falling, the gravitational pull of weight, of arriving, going to, coming from, letting go, cycles of leaving and returning and leaving again. The idea that seemingly fixed states of being can in fact change given the right circumstances and alchemy within the material – the struggle of freedom and liberation – the essence…”
The power of Stevie Fieldsend’s work lies within it being so deeply felt and personal, yet also expressive of and identifiable with the universal human condition. It is through this crossover and empathetic connection that her works are powerful expressions of such exquisite raw beauty and potency.
Barbara Dowse
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