JUXTAPOSING HARD AND SOFT

Several themes are apparent in Stephanie’s art—and she’s always exploring new ideas. A common thread is the way the material itself defines her work. She’s fascinated by the interplay of hardness and softness. When she started out, she explains, she was trying to make the wool behave like the sculpting materials she was more familiar with—clay, for instance. “As I started accepting the wool for what it is and not trying to make it act like other things, it really started to kind of inform what I was doing with it,” she says.

She’s also fascinated by the natural world and by humanity’s effects on it, and she thinks of the way she changes soft, fuzzy wool into a dense, hard material as something of a metaphor for that. Her Overbred series speaks to the idea of domestication and selective breeding taken to a shocking extreme.

“For me, [my pieces] often start from actual biology,” Stephanie says. An exhibit of skulls at the California Academy of Sciences got her thinking about skulls, about the stories that animals leave behind—and that got her thinking about teddy bear skulls.

“I have kind of become known for the teddy bear skulls in certain circles…. Again, I love the way people steer nature. Think about a bear: A real bear could eat you, and yet we made it like an infant, made it cute and emphasized all the qualities that make it look like a human infant—a huge forehead, huge eyes, a little muzzle—and we dress them in clothes, and we give them little bowties and things. It’s a way to manipulate the natural world around us.”

Some people find the teddy bear skulls charming; some, creepy. Stephanie enjoys working in this gray area—the line between fragile and strong, soft and hard, cute and macabre.

Stephanie calls the pieces she’s currently working on “flesh and bone” pieces—large abstract pieces that look somehow organic. They’re provocative and mysterious. They beg to be touched, and Stephanie says that’s intentional. (And she does sometimes encourage people to touch her sculptures if she’s there to supervise.) She continues to push the boundaries of what she can do with wool, and she enjoys the contradiction of creating art completely by hand in the heart of Silicon Valley.