Stephanie Mulvihill
New York City based artist and educator
ABOUT
A New York City-based artist and educator, Stephanie Mulvihill works primarily with the drawn image on paper because of its tactile surface and fragile, impermanent quality. By drawing with graphite, she taps into the tradition of drawing as a means of investigation and dissection of both nature and ourselves. In her work, Stephanie explores themes of creation, motherhood and personal evolutions: physical, spiritual and intellectual. Visual references to the body and internal anatomy overlap, meld and transform to create totems honoring our individual and collective transformations. Stephanie’s love of drawing began while studying fine art at Washington University, where she received her BFA. Stephanie lived several years in West Africa before returning to the United States to further her career as an artist and educator. After graduating with her Masters of Arts in Art Education from Columbia University Teachers College, she continued to exhibit her work nationally and internationally. Notable exhibitions include Revelations at Visionary Art Collective in NYC, Red at the New Hanlon Art Center in CA, Uncontested at the SLA Gallery in NYC, Scribbles at the Carter Burden Gallery in NYC and as part of Procreate’s Archive in London, England. Stephanie’s work has also been featured in numerous publications including The Huts Magazine, New Visionary Magazine, and Women United Art Magazine. She can often be found in her studio in Harlem, her garden or out running the paths of Central Park searching for natural surprises in urban New York City.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work uses mixed media drawing as a means to investigate and analyze our interior and exterior environments. I seek a connection to the past as well as an examination of the present. My current series uses my body as a storytelling device in which to process personal tragedies and moments of shared experience as women, mothers and humans. The figures in my work represent an allegorical journey into the cycles of habit and thought which bind us to our past. They are a reflection and a meditation into painful self-truths that keep us from a sense of equilibrium. Personal fragmentation, introspection and subsequent rebirth allude to the experience of motherhood and the creation of new life. The figures in my work represent the alchemical process of combining experience with history and destruction with rebirth, in a continual reformation of our self-perception. Alchemists once believed they could combine disparate materials in a communion of science, religion and magic to transform their intrinsic nature into something new. These figures represent the desire to change lead and iron, metals they believed were “sick” or not fully matured, into gold. The overlay of gesture, pose and expression map our continual evolution and the change our physical and spiritual selves undertake as we work through our various personal tragedies, struggles, triumphs and sorrows. The fragmented body in my work is partially obscured with symbols of the magnolia flower, the most primitive flowering tree with a fossil record of 60 million years, and the cardinal, a bird that does not migrate or change to hide as its environment changes. Our new selves are a combination of the unchanging past and an unknown future. The body synthesizes, morphs and contorts in an undulating exchange between tension and release, the eternal and the ephemeral, conflict and peace, and ultimately revealing a new version of ourselves. This work seeks to visualize the physical and spiritual sense of loss, reveal the process of personal evolution and express the ultimate acceptance of change.
Website: https://www.stephaniemulvihill.com/
Instagram: @smulvihillart