Paintings by Stephanie C Cosby

b. 1975, Vitória, Brasil

Lives and works in Corvallis, Oregon, usa

I like to think my first visual and spiritual language came from the iron dust that rode in on light beams and salty ocean air, coating my first home in Brasil. I saw, smelled, felt, and tasted its bright, rusty particles as I crawled around exploring.

The iron from the “iron quadrangle” in Minas Gerais is mined, extracted from the land without permission. This specific type of iron ore is called Itabirite, red ochre formed alongside hematite, magnetite, and quartz. I imagine that my ancestors reached me through this energetically rich iron dust and provided an initiation into the dreamworld where I receive inspiration for paintings, and sometimes see the future, a world I can rely on for my own healing. The forms I paint come from this dream﹌portal﹌place and are also painted with ochres, a symbol of their origin story.

My years of primarily photographic work leading up to the current body of paintings in 2020 was a time that I connected deeply with the Cosmos. That work was a response to years of feeling like an alien in my body and within the culture I was raised. I experienced a profound displacement and disassociation that bound me with the cosmos, the beautiful mystery of the furthest away place. The unseen realms were where my head and heart lived when making that work. I simultaneously engaged with plants, folk-herbalism and gardening. Soon enough my body cried out to be noticed and cared for, begging me to bring head and heart down to Earth. It was the physical ailments that inevitably follow a traumatized upbringing, in combination with the plants themselves, that called for the necessity of embodiment.

It was during this survival moment of shifting my focus toward embodiment that the abstracted surreal forms came to me in a dream. I think of the forms as a language I can use to paint without the confines of hetero-normative and neuro-normative identity, gender, ethnicity, class, or historical context. I can’t truly objectively paint, as all of my personal experiences inextricably form the identities I bring with me, however, these are forms that liberate me, the painter, from all of those constraints while painting. This seems to be an important part of the self-healing that happens when painting. My painting practice is also a practice of internal composting and transforming grief, which is one part of my personal liberation work. These forms hold space for wound healing (physical/psychic/energetic).

This work centers around the human body as a place, the body viewed as land and water, an entire ecosystem part of the external ecosystem, and their liberation from colonizing forces. My paintings are also about caregiving, because caregiver is the primary role I play in this life and it is an integral force in this liberation. Aaccessibility in art is a big part of my identity and mission as an artist.