Artist Spotlight: Stephanie Robison
I am a first generation college student with not one but two degrees in sculpture. I feel this is important to mention because being a first generation college student allowed me the freedom to get a “useless” degree in art or whatever I wanted without any parental pressure. College simply wasn’t prioritized in my family; it was a place people went to lose their religion and thus not a destination my family wished me to set sights on. The only reason I actually ended up in college was due to encouragement and assistance from a puzzled high school counselor who couldn’t figure out why someone with a 4.0, enrolled in college prep courses, wouldn’t be planning on attending college.
In college, I was required to take a sculpture course. I put it off until the last possible moment, completely clueless that it held my destiny. That first day of class, when my hands touched clay, I knew my life would be forever changed. I immediately began creating work in series from whatever material I could get my hands on. My instructor, exasperated by my refusal to hollow out my large clay forms (claiming truth to material as my philosophical line in the sand), handed me a brochure for a summer stone carving workshop at the University of Oregon. Eager for more information and material knowledge I enrolled and met Laura Alpert, Kazutaka Uchida, Tom Urban, Dan Michael and David Miller. It was an exhilarating 10-day hands-on experience! I loved learning from these incredible artists and ended up returning to University of Oregon to achieve a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture. 
Upon graduation in 2004, Tom Urban and LeeAnn Peterson convinced me (more accurately they hounded me and wouldn’t take “no” for an answer), that I needed to go to Washington to participate in a stone carving symposium. This was my introduction to NWSSA. I know you can all relate to that mind blowing experience of seeing 80+ people on a field with pop-up tents, power tools humming and dust blowing. I couldn't believe how incredibly generous with time, tools and information this motley crew of stone addicts was. I fell head-over-heels in love with the NWSSA Tribe and vowed to help in whatever way I could: field set-up, auction, registration, t-shirt & brochure design, recruiting and eventually assisting the director of Silver Falls Symposium until I relocated to California in 2010.
Moving to California proved good for my productivity. I am able to carve stone all year round and have been incredibly prolific over the last ten years, continuing to experiment, challenge and improve my skills each year. I always work on several pieces at once, that way if I get stuck I can work on another piece while I consider how to solve problems with the other. I don’t think about style at all but I do think about formal characteristics: form, color, texture, etc. I often use family, friends and relationships in general for inspiration. I like to make work that is intentionally awkward and that references more than one thing because that is how I see our humanity. I am interested in making objects that cause me (and perhaps others) to think differently.
Teaching has been a huge part of my life and artistic practice. I currently teach sculpture for the City College of San Francisco. And I very well might be the only instructor left in the Bay Area that teaches stone carving. What I enjoy most about teaching is introducing students to new ideas, concepts, materials, skills, and artists – I feel that a big part of my job as an instructor is to get them excited about making.
Having knowledge of, and access to, amazing artists work is a gift that challenges me to strive for greatness. A few of the artists that have influenced me over the years are: Louise Bourgeois for her ability to skillfully work with any material and for the narrative quality of her work; Jessica Stockholder for her dedication to formal elements, fearlessness, and propensity for rule breaking. Whenever I am being too cautious, or conforming to expectations, I ask myself “what would Jessica Stockholder do?” Rachel Feinstein uses humor and familiar materials to bring us something new. Her work has a cartoon or animated quality that I admire. I find the organic forms of Richard Deacon compelling. He is a great example of someone who works hard and is extremely prolific. I am obsessed with Ron Nagels color combinations, textures, and small but powerful forms. I like to look for artists that use materials in interesting and unusual ways. 
What interests me most about sculpture is how it engages the audience in a physical way. It responds to the body. I love the complexity three-dimensional work has– a sculpture can look completely different from the first view but as you walk around the composition changes. Sculpture for me is about tangibility and transformation. It involves technique, knowledge of materials and practice. Being able to manipulate materials with your hands, transforming it into something else, is a magical process and an extremely educational one. Every time I make something I learn something and it inspires the next thing. Creating an intimate relationship with materials slows one down and can generate a different level of thinking, one that our convenience-based society does not often engage in. Exploring materials with your hands also engages body or muscle memory – a different way of storing knowledge. Making and focusing on craft has the ability to conjure up collective material knowledge and experiences. It causes one to reevaluate objects; how things are made takes on new meaning. I work in a variety of material but stone is always there as a constant. I like using materials that are familiar in unexpected ways. I have always been attracted to forms that are in direct opposition to each other or challenge their final aesthetic/functional appearance: I have intentionally carved stone to appear soft, or sewn fabrics to appear rigid and architectural.
Stephanie Robison
www.stephanierobison.com/
I have always been a person who likes to take things apart and find what lies hidden inside. Maybe that is what draws me to carve stone: the idea that there is something within waiting to be released. I have been hesitant to call myself a sculptor. Sculptors are those other people. I do this as a hobby, but by creating sculptures I have slowly been able to accept the idea that yes, I am a sculptor.
I can’t remember a time when making art has not been a part of my life. My dad commented once that I was born with a pencil in my hand, and he did so much to keep those “pencils” around me.
It was an Art for Elementary Education Teachers class that influenced me most in my philosophy about my art. The class was not a required course for art majors, but it was taught in a space next to the painting studio, and I was fascinated listening to the lectures by the instructor, Richard Reinhardt. When I had the opportunity to take a few electives, I signed up.
I did carve at that first symposium—honest, I did. But mostly I immersed myself in the senses of carving, reflecting back to that class in 1984. I watched others carve using so many techniques it was almost overwhelming. I learned the sounds a stone makes when it is nearing the breaking point during the splitting process. I smelled and tasted stone dust on a daily basis, and mostly I touched, feeling a variety of stone in various stages of carving. I became “hooked”. I even purchased a piece of soapstone, the first of many, to be carved at home in my backyard.
My next piece, Kitters—named by the present owner—(18x6x6) is a basalt crystal. Kitters declared himself when I was walking through a landscaping stone yard looking for a piece of basalt to test out my new diamond cutting/grinding blade and polishing pads. I used a 4.5" grinder to do all of the work, but the final buff was done by hand.
My most-recently completed piece is Imperfect Harmony (16x9x11). I had a piece of alabaster sitting amongst my stone pile. The shape of a treble clef in a mobius form kept invading my thoughts, so when it was time to go to the 2018 Suttle Lake symposium, I brought it along and got started. It was pretty slow going, mostly because I was fighting health issues. The incomplete form came home with me to finish. I had a sense of urgency to complete it before November, because I was looking at heart surgery. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t listening to the stone and when one tap broke it into three pieces, I put my hammer and chisel down, and walked away, leaving it on my carving table. There it remained, while I moved on to getting through the surgery and the recovery afterwards. I passed it several times a day, working on other projects. Recently however, it called to me, and the stone told me to get on with it. I decided to use kintsugi to complete it. I found some gold “dust” and mixed it into epoxy and fit the pieces back together. Once they set up, I was able to file, rasp, and sand the stone into its finished form. After I polished it, the gold seams are barely visible, but they are there, and I’m ok with that.
“Gutter Goyle” L 29 " X H 8.5” X D 10”
This is carved from Wenatchee soapstone. I try to convince folks that it is something I found on one of my trips to Europe and managed to bring it home hidden in my carry-on. I really enjoy looking at all the fragments and minute carvings that all of our previous stone artists have left us to find. The critter design on this piece is from a sketch of some carvings I saw on a cathedral wall in France. It was carved with hand chisels and files. 
“Prometheus Dragon” L 12.5” X H 9.5” X D 7.5”
I am a maker and creative being to the core. I have painted, woven, felted, sculpted, sketched, and more, but still hadn't thought of myself as an artist. I knew that I needed to create in order to stay balanced and centered in my life. Art was more of a by-product of what I was doing — whether that was cooking, baking, gardening, or basket-weaving, art would infiltrate in as a driving philosophy, both consciously and subconsciously. Growing up in California, I took art classes in high school and entered college as an art major. Intimidated by the art world, I quickly switched majors and ended up getting a degree in Cultural Ecology with an emphasis in agriculture and became a gardener and herbalist by trade.
I spent the next few years working on Organic and Biodynamic farms in Indiana, New Jersey, and Tennessee. Eventually I landed on 150 acres in the backwoods of Tennessee where a lifelong dream of homesteading with a small community of friends was brought to fruition. Five years later, yearning for the waters and mountains of the Pacific Northwest, I ended up settling in Washington State on Lopez Island. I still live there today with my husband and daughter in the home we built. I did a lot of exploring and creating during this period but I didn’t do much classic ‘art.’
My first serious encounter with stone was a mixed-materials piece in 1982, featuring a 300-pound granite glacial erratic that I had dragged from the woods. Working on this piece got me totally hooked on stone and particularly on granite. Since my training was in metal casting and fabrication and I knew nothing about carving stone, I naturally decided to become a stone sculptor. 
