Artist Bio

A New York City-based artist and educator, Stephanie Mulvihill works primarily with the drawn image on paper because of its tactile surface and fragile impermanence. Though her work uses mixed media, its core lies in drawing. The act of drawing taps into the historical tradition of investigation and analysis of our interior and exterior environments and the physical experience of engaging with materials; it is a connection to the past and a reflection on the present. Her work explores themes of creation, loss, motherhood, and personal evolution: physical, spiritual and intellectual. Visual references to the body and internal anatomy overlap, meld and transform to create totems honoring our individual and collective transformations.

Stephanie’s love of drawing began while studying fine art at Washington University, where she received her BFA. Stephanie lived several years in West Africa before returning to the United States to further her career as an artist and educator. After graduating with her Masters of Arts in Art Education from Columbia University Teachers College, she continued to exhibit her work nationally and internationally. Notable exhibitions include: Art of the Educator at MoMA in NYC, Art Exchange at Culture Lab LIC and Limen Museum in Italy,  Collecting at the Westbeth Gallery in NYC, Red at the New Hanlon Art Center in CA, Uncontested at the SLA Gallery in NYC, Scribbles at the Carter Burden Gallery in NYC and as part of Procreate’s Archive in London, England.Stephanie’s work has also been featured in numerous publications including The Huts Magazine, New Visionary Magazine, and Women United Art Magazine. She can often be found in her studio in Harlem, her garden or outrunning the paths of Central Park searching for natural surprises in urban New York City.

Artist Statement

Constructed Mythologies and Household Saints

Mythology, ritual, ceremony. My work explores the physical and emotional environments we construct in order to organize chaos. In these times of turmoil: living with anxiety, watching beloved relationships change or fade, learning to let go of a child aging into adulthood, watching parents age and fade, I began to reflect on the ways in which we try to control the uncontrollable. In our search for peace and balance we cling to habits, pray to saints and hide from our demons. We accept and reject the inevitability of change. The figures of this series overlap and morph, claustrophobic and trapped in a beautiful yet dangerous idealized world. These jungles where the figures live are imaginary, constructed worlds, alive with color and energy and hidden danger. Shown together, the paintings reference the idol paintings and the Stations of the Cross found in the Catholic Churches of my childhood. The figures transport the viewer into an idealized natural world filled with beauty, fear, shame and danger.  Inspiration and background motifs are inspired by the wallpapers of the Victorian era. These wallpapers created the same fantasied space, carefully chosen to curate a home, but instead were beauty laced with poison. This is the mythological space we create to form how we fundamentally view our world. The figures are totems or idols to the everyday struggles, the dark secrets and harmful tendencies we construct to hold us captive to habit and built experience. 

I work with a combination of drawing, painting, and collage, mostly on paper, mirroring the ways in which we take elements from a variety of experiences to build our perception of the world. My work centers on constructed bodies where anatomical reality and fantasy blend. The figures are mostly headless, as they represent more than a single person. I use my own body as a projection of my own struggles to accept the present. They mourn the loss of what once was, and struggle to accept the reality of now.