Stephanie Hargrave
As a visual artist, my main focus is abstracting biological functioning by creating conversations among the pieces using clay, encaustic, paper and steel wire.
MessageHargrave has been painting and working in clay since college, where she studied color theory, ceramics, sculpture, drawing, painting, as well as creative writing. She has shown her work in Seattle, Minneapolis, San Luis Obispo, Santa Fe, Brooklyn, NY, Manhattan, Truro, MA and Atlanta. Her paintings are in several corporate collections including Seattle’s University House, Swedish Hospital and the University of Washington Medical Center, Barclays International in Texas, the Abri Hotel in San Francisco, the Woodmark Hotel in Kirkland, and Kaiser Permanente in Baltimore. Over the past 19 years she has had 20 solo shows, been in 13 2-3 person shows, and participated in 79 group shows, the most recent being Bainbridge Island Museum of Art’s Spotlight Group Exhibit in the summer of 2023.
In 2014 she was a panelist for Inside Art at Seattle’s Town Hall and in the accompanying exhibit curated by Juan Alonso-Rodriquez. Her collaborative work with RobRoy Chalmers was on the cover of New York’s Art Voices Magazine, and she was published in Jennifer Margell’s book Encaustic Art. In 2015 she juried the Mercer Island Art Council’s Annual Art Show, and her work Capra Hircus 3 was selected for the Encaustic Art Institute’s permanent collection. In 2016 she received a grant to complete a collaborative permanent art installation at Einstein Middle School featuring the work of over 120 students. That same year she was given the William Radcliffe Studio Challenge Award during the Kirkland Art Center’s auction and awarded a project grant from International Encaustic Artists. With her Shift Gallery colleagues, she was juried into the International Seattle Art Fair in 2017, 2018 & 2019. She participated in two Brooklyn, NY based residencies in 2019 with celebrated encaustic artist Michael David, one focused on the city’s art fairs, the other on critical thinking. In February 2020 she moved to New York as the director of virtual online programming for M.David & Co. and was a resident for 3 months at Judy Pfaff’s art compound in Tivoli, NY. That same year she was the juror for Lynn Hanson Gallery’s ICON exhibition. She has done numerous commissions, and donated work to art auctions annually since 2005. She has taught privately for over 20 years and has instructed workshops at both Pratt Fine Arts Center and Northwest Encaustic in Seattle, as well as Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill in Massachusetts, where in June she demonstrated at the International Encaustic Conference.
She moved from Brooklyn back to Seattle in September 2022 to focus on sculpture, and continue her encaustic paintings and works on paper. Her 25-year studio practice is her very nucleus.
Statement
Hargrave’s work has always referenced biology. Prior work centered on botany, organisms, and cellular structures, but most recently she has concentrated on insects, fungi, bones and horns, organs, synapses, and sea creatures. Abstracting the body, on both a macro and micro level, is a custom that has grown over the years.
She submerged herself in the study of deep-sea creatures and bioluminescence that resulted in a series of black, dark Prussian blue and white encaustic paintings call Hybrid. Beyond the ocean references, these works also intentionally resemble x-rays and angiograms. At M.David & Co in Brooklyn she created an installation that combined etymology and entomology; the concept was arthropods and the words once used to refer to them that are no longer in use. Titled Semantic Drift it included photographs of crocheted insect-like forms printed on Kozo paper, infused with beeswax, and attached to the wall with specimen pins. The originals, crocheted cotton string dyed black, were bundled together, titled Biomass, and hung from the ceiling near her metal wall sculpture whose shadow cast an uncanny resemblance to a dragonfly wing. Her porcelain sculpture, Magical Thinking, is a torso sized grouping of hand pinched bell-like forms finished in black encaustic that pays homage to the medicinal qualities of mushrooms. Hung freely, it sways slowly with the air movement in the room and floats visually, in blatant disregard to its weight.
Whatever her focus, the underlying premise is a constant; biological functioning, and how we understand ourselves and the world we live in from that perspective. Abstracting those ideas and generating organic-looking objects allows for a wide array of entry points into the work and encourages various interpretations. Natural forms made from natural materials is key, but not necessary. She works mainly with clay, wood, steel, beeswax, and paper but whatever assists with the visual message is what gets used. Recently Yupo, a smooth synthetic paper that allows for wonderful gradations as the ink evaporates off the non-porous surface, has been incorporated.
The most satisfying aspect of her practice is the making itself but seeing how the work hits an audience is vital: that is where connections are made and vault naturally into new ideas. This process mimics biological functioning and completes the circle.
www.stephaniehargrave.com