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Katy Stone

b. 1969 Rockford, IL; Lives and works in Seattle, WA

Katy Stone
Katy Stone

BIOGRAPHY

Katy Stone (b. 1969 Rockford, IL) is best known for her large-scale installations and wall sculptures. Working primarily in aluminum, Dura-Lar and plexiglass, Stone creates hybrids of sculpture and painting that combine the visual language of organic forms with synthetic materials. Her work balances a sense of monumentality and durability with motion and fragility. Each layered, cascading work consists of scores of drawn and hand-painted gestures that seem frozen in a moment of falling, fluttering, waving, crashing or exhaling. Over her career, she has developed an intricate vocabulary of line, shape, form and mark-making that blur the boundaries between traditional techniques of drawing, painting and sculpture.

Deeply interested in the multiplicative elements of nature, physical transmutations, Immanence theory and the vast interpretive potential of “nameable” things, among other things, Stone’s sculptural assemblages and installations act as both kaleidoscope and microscope. From the cellular to the cosmic, the artist draws from a wide range of natural bodies and conceptual source material that frequently lead to an artistic mediation on transience and permanence, nature and artifice.

“The layers of tension between substance and ethereality, growth and decay are pivotal in the work, but so is the harmony that emerges,” Stone explains. “Within each piece is the notion of the timeless, of tapping into an ongoing flow; the idea that a mark, line or shape can become a sign, symbol, or metaphor for the infinite.”

Stone grew up in Iowa before attending Iowa State University in Aimes. In 1994, she received an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle, where she lives and works today. As an undergraduate student, she was introduced to the works of Mark Rothko and Joan Mitchell, two abstract expressionist artists who had an important influence on Stone’s artistic development.

Stone has completed major commissions at the Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland; The Cosmopolitan, Las Vegas; Jackson Federal Courthouse, Jackson; Kirkland Justice Center, Kirkland; Lake Washington Institute of Technology, Kirkland; Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Swedish Medical Center, Seattle; Sound Transit Light Rail South Bellevue Station, Bellevue; Twin Parks, Taichung, Taiwan; and the Woodmont Library, Des Moines among others.

She has exhibited at Boise Art Museum, ID; Boston University Art Gallery, MA; Center on Contemporary Art, WA; Kansas City Art Institute, KS; Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art, MS; MassArt Art Museum, MA; McNay Art Museum, TX; Missoula Art Museum, MT; Schneider Museum, NC; Sun Valley Center, ID; University of Akron, OH; University of Richmond, VA; Washington State Convention Center, WA; and Watcom Museum of Art, WA.

Her work is held in the public collections of Boise Art Museum, ID; City of Seattle, WA; Iowa State University, IA; McNay Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX; Missoula Art Museum, MT; Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, MI; Swedish Medical Center, Seattle, WA and the US Art in Embassies of Mumbai and Baghdad.

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