Women United ART PRIZE 2023
Collage & Fiber Art Category
2nd place winner

ARTIST BIO

Stacy Isenbarger’s artworks provoke a sense of tactile memory. Collisions of materiality within precariously occupied space challenge viewers to confront the sentimentality of distance and restraint. Tensions created put us at odds with comfort and the familiar, asking us to confront the air shifting around us. Through her work we are often reminded of what seems just out of reach but perhaps still worth pursuing. Isenbarger’s creative pursuits include sculpture, installation, mixed-media drawings, and supporting community exchange through art.

She works as an Associate Professor of Art + Design at the University of Idaho. Currently she shares her time between Moscow, Idaho, USA and Cardiff, Wales. When she's not teaching or making—and sometimes when she is—she's usually dancing since the act continuously validates her joy of community acceptance and shaking up space.

ARTIST STATEMENT

There has been much worth letting go of in recent years, yet I still feel an atmospheric pull to try and tie the air back together, to weave something grounding where I am. These works are part of my SHED series where I use collisions of soft and known spaces to challenge viewers to confront distance and lost sensations of home.

Although they could, I don’t expect viewers to touch these pieces. They are constructed to provoke a sense of tactile memory. By calling to mind the presence and absence of domestic surfaces through formal connections, textile pattern and textured surfaces, these works weave subtle stories of growth, reconsiders physical and personal boundaries, and put viewers at odds with the familiar. By reclaiming the domestic, repurposing traditional sewing techniques, and pulling together fractured forms, these works hold place for a kind of offered relief, a sense of (re)rooting.

Moscow, ID / United States