artist statement:
My artwork explores the use of nature as decoration, a role I think it’s been assigned to in our design-centric, modern world. In our society, homes are decorated with paintings or photographs of nature. Gardens are beautifully landscaped and we live in carefully planned communities or, if we actually live in nature, the value of the home is in its beautiful view or proximity to natural phenomena. In cities, the natural areas are caged in, giving the illusion that the city was built up around them, when they are actually carefully developed projects. The juxtapositions present don’t always make sense either – grass is kept unnaturally short and cacti live inside homes in colder climates.
I started making paintings of plants and animals after a deeply meaningful trip to Australia. There, I marveled at how different the natural world was from my home in New York and found myself inspired to include natural elements in my artwork. When I returned, I started crowding my picture plane with plants and animals. Eventually, I began to arrange them by shape and found myself selecting the painting subjects for purely aesthetic reasons. Because of this, in my work, a crab or starfish is really no different than a triangle or a pattern.
Over ten years ago, as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, I was trained to use archival mediums and continue to do so in my work today. I construct all the wooden painting panels myself, using birch and pine.
It is my hope that by intentionally representing animals and plants as decoration, I am highlighting their current role and value. I use decorative motifs such as repetition, pattern, shape, color, and texture to transform them into decoration and in some paintings, the animals have come to life, rebelling against the decoration as a means to further highlight their role and to also hint that nature cannot be controlled.
bio:
Stephanie Chambers is a 2003 graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design. She lives in New York, where she is originally from and works out of a studio space at MadArts in Brooklyn. Her work has been shown at galleries in New York, San Francisco, Providence and Germany.
My artwork explores the use of nature as decoration, a role I think it’s been assigned to in our design-centric, modern world. In our society, homes are decorated with paintings or photographs of nature. Gardens are beautifully landscaped and we live in carefully planned communities or, if we actually live in nature, the value of the home is in its beautiful view or proximity to natural phenomena. In cities, the natural areas are caged in, giving the illusion that the city was built up around them, when they are actually carefully developed projects. The juxtapositions present don’t always make sense either – grass is kept unnaturally short and cacti live inside homes in colder climates.
I started making paintings of plants and animals after a deeply meaningful trip to Australia. There, I marveled at how different the natural world was from my home in New York and found myself inspired to include natural elements in my artwork. When I returned, I started crowding my picture plane with plants and animals. Eventually, I began to arrange them by shape and found myself selecting the painting subjects for purely aesthetic reasons. Because of this, in my work, a crab or starfish is really no different than a triangle or a pattern.
Over ten years ago, as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, I was trained to use archival mediums and continue to do so in my work today. I construct all the wooden painting panels myself, using birch and pine.
It is my hope that by intentionally representing animals and plants as decoration, I am highlighting their current role and value. I use decorative motifs such as repetition, pattern, shape, color, and texture to transform them into decoration and in some paintings, the animals have come to life, rebelling against the decoration as a means to further highlight their role and to also hint that nature cannot be controlled.
bio:
Stephanie Chambers is a 2003 graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design. She lives in New York, where she is originally from and works out of a studio space at MadArts in Brooklyn. Her work has been shown at galleries in New York, San Francisco, Providence and Germany.
