BEAUTY: Fabric Art--Stephanie K. Clark

Stephanie K. Clark's work is delightful. Working on fabric with embroidery floss, she makes portraits of lone dwellings from apartment buildings to Mid-Century Modern ranch houses to American four squares to Victorian homes to trailers to Arts and Crafts bungalows. But the particularly fascinating part is how these abodes are isolated, devoid of nearly all context save for an occasional outline suggesting a tree, cactus, or dog. This creates a ghostly feeling as if we are seeing a house through someone's memory...as if that place, that dwelling was the center of the world for whomever lived or lives there. I suspect this is how all of us perceive where we live.

Her Artist Statement:
"I considers myself a painter and I paint with thread. The process of transforming string into art struck me as something visually stimulating with complex simplicity. My background in painting has allowed me to explore the material using techniques that derive more from the worlds of drawing and painting, engaging both traditional and innovative techniques in employing formal qualities with density, texture and pattern. The embroidery floss is my palette and the needle is my paintbrush. I create a method of embroidering the threads in an arrangement that would initially create value, color, depth and as I lay the colors down they instantly blend themselves."

And looking at her website, I fell in love with her Partly Cloudy series, fabric and thread "paintings" of clouds at various times of the day. Just lovely.

http://stephart.blogspot.com/
http://stephaniekellyclark.wix.com/stephaniekclark