Veritas Journal is committed to the place of the arts in human awakening. This article is one of our “Featured Artists” series, introductions to contemporary artists whose work we find moving, valuable, and worth supporting by featuring them here. Click on an image to view an expanded version, and be sure to visit the link at the bottom for more from the artist.
Stephanie Hunder’s art is inspired by memories of growing up in the woodlands and prairies of Minnesota. Her work often begins with forms and textures drawn from landscapes, which are then combined with scientific diagrams as a way to investigate our contemporary relationship to the natural world.
“I am building a visual connection between nature and science,” she explains, “the complex, qualitative characteristics of the environment, and the logical constructs we use to comprehend them.” She considers printmaking and photographic processes like cyanotype as ways to investigate these relationships.
“We perceive the world through our learned and shared ideas from science and culture. Often, when we ask a question or create an experiment, observation does not return a simple answer, but instead a dense tangle of complex information. Scientists and mathematicians transform these messy tangles into orderly theories with elegant diagrams – formats more logical to our human minds. My work incorporates these mediated illustrations of knowledge, layered with the more direct, but more complicated, documentary evidence of the world.”
To illustrate, she describes the difference between our knowledge of the recent coronavirus pandemic and previous plagues or outbreaks. “Our understanding of the disease is different than plagues of the past, in which often people did not know what brought the illness – something in the water, or a fog at night? Today, we can picture these little particles attaching to various cells and organs in our body, wreaking havoc with our systems. What does this iconic image suggest to us… a crown, the sun, a mandala? A cathedral rose window uses a similar ringed circle to suggest the totality of creation – it can be beautiful or terrible.”
Working from home during the pandemic, Hunder experimented with creating large cyanotypes in her backyard and toning them with tea. Later, in the studio, she used screen printing to add layers of corona-like forms, illustrations people have made to understand complex situations.
In her most recent project, Viriditas, she used actual plants to print collagraphs of native flora, capturing the fine textures and material quality we observe directly with our senses. These were then layered with silkscreened and laser-cut theoretical diagrams — tessellation forms, cellular automata, and polytopes.
“By examining and celebrating the intricate workings of our natural surroundings,” she says, “I consider how our connection to this world, and interpretation of it, manifests in our experience of being human at this point in history.”
To view more of Stephanie Hunder’s work, visit www.stephaniehunder.com!
header image: Stephanie Hunder Installation of Viriditas
