Stephanie Ashby

In her sculptural work, Stephanie Ashby accumulates, stacks, joins and groups repeated elements to assemble an overall object. The result is a simple composition with internal complexities that often resembles a natural form. Stephanie moved to Seattle in 1988 and attended the University of Washington where she earned a BFA in sculpture. She has shown at COCA and other spaces, and has artwork in the collections of King County, City of Seattle, Harborview Medical Center and UW Graduate School.

Stephanie’s recent series of paper cut drawings are patterned structures of dynamic light and shadow that shift and move with the viewer’s vantage point. The surface planes are disrupted by cutting and folding, and further manipulated by curving, draping or folding the entire plane of the sheet, creating a sort of non-surface. 2011 GAP funds will be used to purchase materials and to pay for the manufacture of test plates which will become technical reference materials for future projects. These plates will be used to observe and record the physical properties of varied machine cuts and scoring using water jet and/or laser cutting on aluminum, stainless steel and cold rolled steel on different sheet thicknesses of each material.