Email: stephanie(at)stephaniemetz.com

Instagram: @stephanie_metz_sculpture

Youtube: @StephanieMetzSculpture

Resume: Downloadable Resume

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Studio Visits: By appointment only

Artist Statement:

The ideas that drive my work center on the changing ways humans see ourselves in relationship to each other and our fellow inhabitants of Earth. I approach my art practice as if I’m creating specimens for a natural history museum: objects that are individually remarkable, capable of standing for larger concepts, and subject to evolving categorization, understanding, and meaning. I’m particularly interested in the way a museum reflects the changing values and beliefs of its contributors, and in a related way the reactions to my uncanny sculptures are part of the artwork.

My medium is felted wool: I compress and smooth white fibers into nearly solid yet lightly hairy forms that blend fleshy animal-like curves with clean elegant lines reminiscent of bone. My dramatically organic and tactile sculptures appear familiar yet alien; they suggest the wonder of encountering new species or shaping new breeds. Their unique appearance and visual presence moves them a step away from sculpture towards something nearly alive. These pieces ask: How do we shape the “natural” world, and where do we fit within it? By giving form to imagined life, I explore what makes us feel connected to or separate from it.

Biography:

Stephanie Metz (United States, b. 1976) creates alluring yet unsettling sculptures and installations using wool as her medium. She manipulates fiber to create three-dimensional objects that are both seductive and repulsive, muscular and elegant. Hand stitching thick industrial felt and repetitively needle felting wool fibers into solid masses, she creates forms ranging from intimately sized to monumental. Her works embody nuanced, contradictory ideas in approachable yet mysterious materials. Her visceral organic sculptures—physically and conceptually both soft and edgy—reference the body as both subject and object

Metz holds a BFA in Sculpture from the University of Oregon; she lives with her techie husband and two sons in San Jose, California, where she works from a studio at The Alameda Artworks downtown. She has been featured in publications including San Jose's Content Magazine, Adobe Inspire Magazine, American Craft, and 500 Felt Objects. Her work has been included in the Rijswijk Textile Biennial in the Netherlands as well as Sculptural Felt International and Black Sheep, touring exhibitions that visited Europe and Australia. Her notable group exhibitions include FiberArt International at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and the Museum of Quilts and Textiles in San Jose, Formex Stockholm 2008 in Sweden, and Transmission:Experience at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore. In 2015 she was honored as an Artist Laureate by Silicon Valley Creates, and she is a recipient of a mysterious and wonderful Belle Foundation for Cultural Development grant as well as two Center for Cultural Innovation grants and an Honorable Mention for the International Sculpture Center’s Innovator Award. Several times a year she is invited to teach her innovative techniques at art guilds and craft schools including Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina and Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Tennessee. She has recently developed a way to reach larger audiences across the world with an online video-based workshop.

Metz’s solo exhibition at the Triton Museum in Santa Clara, California, featured a series of evocative fiber sculptures that explore themes of soft power, aesthetic perception, and the paradoxes of female life through the use of wool felt, body-like forms and the color pink. View the artworks included in the exhibition here, and take a look behind the scenes at their creation here.

For over two years Stephanie worked on a grouping of multiple large-scale touchable felt sculptures that went on exhibit in a solo show at the de Saisset Museum in Santa Clara, California. Stephanie Metz: InTouch ran from January 9 - March 17, 2020; the show closed early due to campus-wide COVID-19 closure. As the world opened up to touchable, interactive experiences once again, InTouch has found subsequent venues including as the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, the Mesa Arts Center, Root Division, the Oceanside Museum of Art, and in September 2027, the Euphrat Museum of Art. You can view video walk-throughs of the exhibition and a behind-the-scenes artist talk/documentary on her YouTube channel, StephanieMetzSculpture.

Stephanie is known as a dynamic public speaker, presenting her work to groups of adults or children, in person or via online video conferencing.

A side project brought about by the popularity of her Teddy Bear Unnatural History sculptures features clothing and gifts that channel her unique blend of art, science, nature, and humor. Find it at UnNaturalDesigns.com.