Descent

Descent
Polyester carpet fibre, 700 x 200 x 200 cm.
New Contemporaries, Sydney College of the Arts, 2014
Photography Jacquie Manning

Stevie Fieldsend creates work that details an emotional state – a feeling or bodily sensation of a past event. With materials as diverse as glass, charred wood, steel and textiles the works explore the way in which emotions and past traumas can be processed and integrated through the making of art. Drawing upon potent personal experiences of trauma and complex PTSD these deeply felt works give powerful material expressions of the way seemingly fixed states of being can, given the right circumstances, be transformed.

The artist says “Central to my work is the female body, trauma (or how trauma resides in my body and mind) and a sense of movement, of oozing, falling, coming to, going somewhere, a maturation in flux – perhaps too soon, the fissures between internal and external, a gravitational plummet, transference, the sensation of being pulled out of myself, of exceeding boundaries – a transgression.” In works such as Descent (pictured) the artist explores transgenerational trauma, painstakingly untangling a torrent of fibres over 165 hours. Repeating these gestural patterns over and over, the artist engages with the alchemical potential of making as a way of processing and healing: “Something inside unravels a little, becomes looser, becomes tangible and externalised which opens up space for new possibilities, for both myself and my children and so on...”

Fieldsend studied glass at Sydney College of the Arts and The Jam Factory Craft and Design Centre in Adelaide, and completed both a Master of Fine Art and a Master of Studio Arts at Sydney College of the Arts. She has participated in solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally and has been the recipient of numerous art prizes including: the Scenic World Staff Choice Award for Sculpture at Scenic World (2015), the Rookwood Necropolis Sculpture Award (2013) and Sculpture in the Vineyards (2012). She has been a finalist in the 2015 NSW Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging), the Redlands Konika Minolta Art Prize (2015), the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award (2014), the Blake Prize (2013), and the Willoughby Sculpture Prize (2013). Fieldsend’s work has been presented at Hong Kong Art Central, Sydney Contemporary Art Fair, Melbourne Art Fair and in curated group exhibitions at Moreton Bay Regional Gallery, Caboolture Regional Art Gallery, Cessnock Regional Art Gallery, Campbelltown Regional Art Gallery and Blacktown Arts Centre. She is represented by Artereal Gallery. 

Frame of Mind:
Mental health and the arts
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