Stephanie Mulvihill
Permanent Transience
Graphite, pigment and colored pencil on paper
2022
My work uses drawing as a means to investigate and analyze our interior and exterior environments. I seek a connection to the past as well as an examination of the present. My current series uses my body as a storytelling device in which to process personal tragedies and moments of shared experience as women, mothers and humans. The figures in my work are an allegorical journey into the cycles of habit and thought which bind us to our past. They are about personal transmutation and regeneration. They are a reflection and a meditation into painful self-truths that keep us from a sense of equilibrium. Personal fragmentation, introspection and subsequent rebirth allude to the experience of motherhood and the creation of new life.
My work represents the alchemical process of combining experience with history and destruction with rebirth, in a continual reformation of our self-perception. Alchemists once believed they could combine disparate materials in a communion of science, religion and magic to transform their intrinsic nature into something new. These figures represent the desire to change lead and iron, metals they believed were “sick” or not fully matured, into gold. The overlay of gesture, pose and expression map our continual evolution and the change our physical and spiritual selves undertake as we work through our various personal tragedies, struggles, triumphs and sorrows.
The fragmented body is partially obscured with symbols of the magnolia flower, the most primitive flowering tree with a fossil record of 60 million years, and the cardinal, a bird that does not migrate or change to hide as its environment changes. Our new selves are a combination of the unchanging past and an unknown future. The body synthesizes, morphs and contorts in an undulating exchange between tension and release, the eternal and the ephemeral, conflict and peace, and ultimately revealing a new version of ourselves.
