Anna Stoefen

I'm an artist only so much as anyone else is, which is to say: innately, albeit passionately. More so I'm a conservationist, striving to repurpose items that have been cast aside into artifacts that make new sense. Call it “trash art,” “garbage art,” or “recycled art,” but I like to think of my work as painting without paint. I use almost entirely recycled materials on salvaged canvas, and 25% of all proceeds will be donated to https://oceanconservancy.org/ I work almost completely from found materials: junk mail, magazine clippings, grocery lists, wrapping paper, brochures, old journals, and scraps of all manner. The process usually begins in the periphery, when a small collection of found materials that's been communing in the corner for a while starts to reveal common threads; and so I witness, play around, and yield to the shapes, imagery, textures, and subtleties inherent in the cast-off stuff of our mass production. In this act of assemblage I find inspiration and uncover deeper collective meanings. From my common fascinations (and the trappings of individual style), themes emerge. These are ever-evolving, but to name a few: places of extreme dark and extreme quiet (and the opposite); the ocean; high-tech and low-tech modes of connectivity; the subtle ways people communicate; self-similarity on different scales; memories as narrative; justice and kindness, empathy and perspective, and their challenges; spiders/webs/instinct; rhythm; soundwaves everywhere all the time; the cyclical nature of everything; the moon; etc.