Elizabeth Stone

Visual artist Elizabeth Stone is drawn to the exploration of memory and time deeply rooted within the ambiguity of the photographic medium. Through the repurposing of her analog materials, she investigates the spontaneous aspects of transformation.

Over the last decade, Stone has been questioning the dual aspects of photography. The negative and the positive demand equal attention as she considers the intrinsic aspects of truth and fiction in photography. In thinking about the whole, a constant interchange of destruction and creation drives her impulses in making.

Currently, her work utilizes analog materials to investigate the photograph as a three-dimensional object. She seeks slow, time-consuming practices that meld the hand and mind, decontextualizing and reinterpreting her materials. For the work Ecdysis, Stone cut over 3,000 of her 35mm color negatives, black and white negatives, and color positives into single frames and then sewed them together in a nonlinear pattern. This large-scale dimensional art piece references the action of shedding or casting off an exterior layer. It becomes an outer coat of memory and statement of self. Between Forgetting and Knowing used thousands of hand-knotted, reshaped negatives and positives hung on filament in a pattern based on the mathematics of memory. In addition, the spontaneity of the cameraless chemigram process in the multi-piece grid, Channeled Scablands continues her inquiry into the ambiguity of the medium. Process drives Stone’s work as she continues to push and pull at the edge of what defines and how we see the photograph.

Elizabeth Stone: A Peek Behind The Curtain Artist Talk 11/8