Stephan Crawford
I am a hybrid artist who works across different media, from sculpture and mixed media to cross disciplinary collaborations. My first science/art/technology collaboration, The ClimateMusic Project, has achieved international reach and media coverage.
Much of my work reflects the natural world and our interaction with it. In my sculptural work I typically move beyond a strict representational perspective by reducing the familiar to an essence of flow, line, light and shadow, and pattern. In doing so, I seek to evoke transcendent aspects of reality—harmony, energy, cycles— that are intuitively understood by the viewer and attract because they are grounding.
I am most fully awake and engaged in life when I create. Far from having a cloistering effect, the studio and its thousand struggles, large and small, provide a proving ground for life outside of the studio: it requires that we put one foot in front of the other, that we take risks, and pick ourselves up when we fall. This is all very practical stuff, but studio life also requires that we dream, that we imagine, and that we become masters of the art of play; things that our society normally assigns to the realm of children, but not of adults. To be an artist means reclaiming aspects of our humanity that we have long shed.
