School of Fine Art Sculpture & Environmental Art
Esther Stone
Esther Stone, is a Sculptor whose experience with grief and depression informs her practice, creating works which visualise the comfort she craves and illustrates the hardness she feels she is encouraged to have being from West Yorkshire. Stone aims to harness the softness and the need to look within. Bringing Stone to explore the emotional connection and physical experiences from the different places in which she has lived throughout her life, reflecting on memories from childhood and what solace she finds within that. How have her sources of coping and regulation changed, becoming interested in shared mechanisms that people who have experienced loss and intense sadness have in common. Such as physical re regulating, rocking back and forth, diving into freezing cold water or getting knocked around aggressively in the pit of a punk gig. Stone finds herself being drawn to very physical experiences like these, translating into her practice through aims of interaction and play within the work. Developing Stone’s intrigue in shared coping mechanisms for grief and its direct connection to movement. Using Curfing, where metal, is cut in order to bend and weld, as she feels this embodies her themes, connected to the idea of the steel pipe being hurt to be healed, lacing the metal with second hand textiles with a memory and mark. Creating forms larger than she is, she wants them to have power away from her to make the impact of the feeling that inspired the work to feel smaller. Stone creates her work to find a place for her melancholy and a platform for others to relate and communicate through it.
Safe and Healthy
This work is about the constant labor of grief, against the need to care and soothe yourself, represented through the 326 cuts and 994 welds over the 10m of mild steel, held on machine made lace, weighted down by 120 hand sewn steel weights. The form explores the act of someone in grief keeping themselves safe and healthy, shown through a sculpture that is a complete health and safety nightmare, due to its large scale and rocking movement. Showing the difficulty and constant contradictions people with experiences of grief have to face. The work is large and intimidating whilst being a form to demonstrate a calm and soothing movement of rocking, taking the enormous feeling of grief and translating it into what could aid the grief rather than the focus being on the loss itself.
This work is interactive, in order to add lightness to the heavy form I invite the audience to play with it, as for me grief is about community and support. Therefore this object should be enjoyed, pushed, watched ultimately treated as place of rest and joy, in the aim of recreating a small part of the feeling of sharing my deep loss with loved ones finding humor and connection within the grief.
