|
Brenda
Stumpf
Known for her abstract, intricate, and complex use of non-traditional materials, Stumpf's work is pervaded with mythic and historic figures, sacred texts, and alchemy. Steeped with both intensely personal and archetypal associations, her sculpture, assembled paintings, and drawings reveal dichotomous relationships between virility and delicateness, immovability and transformation, past and present, and, fundamentally, corporeal and spiritual.
Stumpf works intuitively, rarely sketching or planning, and chooses unorthodox materials in creating most of her work. The artist changes materials and media to flood the creative process with new perspectives. Catalysts for these changes constellate with the artist's ceaseless intrigue for the unknowable, the unseen, the ancient, and esoteric. Thus far, materials have included the paper from steeped tea bags, vintage dresses and slips, PVC shavings, wax, deconstructed piano parts, plastic flowers, discarded metal objects, pearls, a shattered car windshield, insects, gourds, found wood, sea shells, doll parts, and hand-cut and engraved book covers.
Imbued in much of Stumpf’s work are female figures such as Pandora, Seshat, the Black Madonna, and Hatshepsut, who seem to be interwoven with Stumpf's personal realm of relationships and self. Themes drawn from the Crusades and Inquisition also appear as the artist continues exploring the dark and more hidden aspects of history and her self.
|
.jpg)
