Stephanie Hanes "Celestial Fragment #1"

Stephanie E. Hanes was born in Alberta, Canada. In 2009 they received a BFA from The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in Halifax, Canada. Hanes is an MFA Graduate of Ceramics at the Rhode Island School Of Design in 2017 and received the prestigious Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship for a graduate student with exceptional promise.  Stephanie was one of six artists awarded the 2020 NCECA Emerging Artist Prize. In addition, they have exhibited Internationally with a solo show at C.R.E.T.A Rome Gallery in Italy and several group shows at Lefebvre et Fils Gallery in Paris, France. Recently, Stephanie exhibited Bronze and Glass works with Secci Contemporary in Florence, Italy. They have exhibited their ceramic sculptures throughout the USA and Canada at several museum group shows: they were featured artists at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, The Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona State University Museum, The Fuller Craft Museum, and RISD Museum Gelman Gallery. They have shown in galleries in Portland with Eutectic Gallery, Seasons Gallery in Seattle, Five Car Garage in Los Angeles, and The Untitled Space In New York City. Hanes is an Assistant Professor in Ceramic Art at New York College Of Ceramics at Alfred University, where they teach ceramic sculpture.

“The grotesque body is not an ugly body but rather, nonconformist which is opposed to the finished and polished. Conceptually it is used as a vehicle for exploring the effects of its repression, the uncanniness exposes the presumed familiarity of symbolic violence and its reaction to the female forms link to monstrosity. That is linked to the fear of female power and the anti-female message in Greek myth and culture that persists to this day.  By using the strategy of mimesis, to unravel feminine truths through mimicry of the “ideal” to make the unseen visible, and ultimately disrupting the illusion of singularity, which is contradictory to the multidimensional experience of reality. The grotesque body has both the potential for creativity and destruction. This deconstruction is to dissolve, to oppose traditional binary distinction. It is a critical practice of playing with ideas and thus destroying convention and giving representational form new thoughts.” - Stephanie Hanes

Learn more about her artwork on our website.