Biography:
Stephanie K. Clark was born in Portland, Oregon. Her family later moved to a cattle farm in the small town of Urbana, Missouri. Her Midwestern home is where she attributes her deep entrenched love for art exploration and creativity. Stephanie's creative drive and artistic technical skills really blossomed while attending Dixie State College in Southern Utah/2006. She then decided to take her art education further; studying her undergrad in the Painting/Drawing Fine Arts program at the University of Utah; where she graduated Fall of 2011. While attending the U of U, Stephanie had explored many mediums beyond just painting and cultivated more conceptually in her work. Her senior year she took the opportunity while taking some drawing classes to do all her drawings using her sewing machine (creating contour line drawings with thread). Playing with thread then lead her to almost all exclusive embroidery work. Besides the small dabbling of sewing taught by her mother and grandmother, Stephanie is a self-taught embroiderer. This new naive material gave her life, that lead her down the rabbit hole of taking a material which is known to be a "craft" and using it to create contemporary pieces of art with the techniques used in painting. She's established that fluttering crush on working with fiber/embroidery floss; and since this well adored ingenuity discovery, most of Stephanie’s work since graduating, consists of fiber art, embroidery, and mixed materials; while focusing on domestic and personal concepts. Stephanie has shown in many galleries throughout the country and completed an art residency at the Kimball Art Center in Park City, Utah 2013. She spends most of her time being a mother and a working artist: executing commissions and showing in galleries; all while pursuing any avenue to exploring the creative process.
Artist Statement:
I'm an embroidery artist; I consider myself a painter; I paint with thread. The embroidery floss is my pallet and the needle is my paintbrush. The process of transforming string into visual art struck me as something multisensory stimulating with complex simplicity. My background in painting has allowed me to explore the material using techniques from the worlds of painting and drawing; engaging both traditional and innovative techniques; in employing formal qualities with density, texture, pattern, value, and color. In my work I’d like to provoke questions and curiosity. Visually, I love it when people bypass my work thinking it’s nothing other than a simple painting or print. Until they look a little closer and see that it's thread. The embroidery process has had its way with me, leading me from hobby to art. My work is an ode influenced by the worlds of tapestry and my love for craft. Using thread instead of oils has allowed me to bring new purpose to painting and the creative process. My work blurs the lines between fine art and craft. I like to think I can reclaim the word “craft” which contains the idea of an unusual frame of knowledge and skill passed on or inherently bestowed genetically from generation to generation of my ancestry. Most often times the use of craft such as embroidery is conceptually intertwined in my pieces. Expressing domestic life and personal narratives conceptually is a common subject amongst my work. In recent years I've started introducing 3D with the material and I want to keep going.