Paintings by Stephanie C Cosby

b. 1975, Vitória, Brasil

Lives and works in Corvallis, Oregon, usa

My paintings dwell in the intersection between ecosystem relationship and ancestral, imaginal, subconscious realms that are instructional and healing. These are paintings that explore themes of life/death, displacement, loss of land, community, family…paintings that are an act of resistance and a balm. Paintings as a form of care giving to self, possibly others. An artist’s response to inter-generational trauma, climate change, and the condemnation of tender, disabled, queer,‘mad’ and brown beings.

I like to think my first visual language came from the iron dust that rode in on light beams and salty ocean air, coating the home I was born into across the bay from the Port of Tubarão. I saw, smelled, felt, and tasted its bright, rusty particles as I crawled around exploring.

This iron oxide was formed alongside hematite, magnetite, and quartz in the “iron quadrangle” of Minas Gerais, Brasil and is heavily mined, without consent from local indigenous communities. 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, a world I can rely on for my own healing. The abstracted human forms, and some of the futurist stories I paint, come from this subconscious place. These forms, reminiscent of stones, are also painted with ochre pigments, a symbol of their origin story.

These human forms that I call “ochre bodies” center around the human body as a place, the body viewed as land and water, and the liberation of all three from colonizing forces. Caregiver is the primary role I play in this life, and I have come to see care as an integral force in this liberation. Perhaps this continuing body of work is autobiographical, or perhaps it is the response in a “call and response” relationship with the dream ﹌portal﹌place I was invited into by my ancestors, the gentle red dust.

2025