Mary Stacy Mazzone
Join us at SOFA New York (May 29, 2008) to see works from this artist.
Stones, our most intimate and tactile links to eternity, have been the focus of my artwork for a decade. My particular passion is for stones shaped, rounded, smoothed and polished overtime by the often violent forces of nature.
“Mute” stones have much to tell, much to reveal to the inquiring sensitive hand and eye; each stone unique, a metaphor of individual integrity and survival.
Over a lifetime of observing, holding, treasuring stones I have come to associate the aesthetic search for the sublime in nature with a striving to understand the inner spirit of things.
The memory of a magical beach of rounded granite boulders on a remote stretch of Maine island shore triggered a lifelong quest for an unattainable ideal, a ‘perfect’ stone. Travels near and far have led to surprising discoveries; that there are stones in the Sahara shaped and polished by wind and sand in the form of dunes, that there are countries (Bangladesh) with no pebbles to hold, where gravel is made of hand crushed bricks, and to the discovery that the most beautiful pebble after all was the one casually retreived on my grandmothers gravel driveway while I was learning to ride a bicycle.
My desire, on my return to Maine years later, to hold those weighty boulders, to possess them, carry them by foot, boat, car and plane back to Italy, was countered by a reluctance to remove them from their natural setting, the remote island where they were formed.. I decided instead, after drawing and photographing them, to make my own, and I have been doing so for over 10 years
My main material is paper, mostly discarded, even my own past artwork. I build with pulp I make myself, but also in layers. The stones are usually hollow, or built around a choice object. I have even used casts of real stones. I began with sizes that could be held in the hand, then made pebbles, and boulders one can sit on. I have made stones that can light up from within, and sculptures one can wear, and I have created installations in incongruous settings. Most recently I have combined photographs of my stones with drawings and etchings in a series of collages called “Interiors”.
Many stones were made in response to emotions and events in my life and world, and are the culmination of an aesthetic search for meaning. While many of my stones appear to be ‘real’, I did not set out to trick the innocent observer into believing they were. My stones were made more in homage and contemplation than in jest.
The making of stones from scratch, from whatever is at hand or from carefully selected papers, the mixing or layering, the building up, the smoothing away, the polishing, the whole destuctive-creative process over time, the analogies to nature’s inimitable ways…has proven to be ultimately a very humbling experience.
I come from a family of artists (and have an artist son), and I have been involved in the arts all my life. Raised and educated in the USA, I hold a BA in Art History from Smith College, and an MA in Art Education from NYU. I live in Rome, Italy with my Italian husband.
