Stacy Howe

"Using extremes of beauty, horror, and the commonplace I work to make these themes compatible if not interchangeable. I render objects of material excess and polite society while tracing their links to barbarism and how we socially construct nature through etiquette.

Through a process of Surrealist inspired automatism I have come to produce a series of assemblages. Surrealist notions of dream imagery, games of chance, and the marriage of contraries are employed to meld incongruous forms which are then harmonized through ornamentation.  My works are composed of an amalgamation of my objects of fascination. The reoccurring themes of my work have fused and been released on paper for later synthesis. My natural tendency is to use symbolic forms of the Gothic, imbuing the inanimate with emotion, the allure of violence, the drive towards death, and the return to the primordial.