Hailey Stumpo

Artist Statement

Saturated colors, expressive marks, childlike stylizations, and philosophical themes converge in my drawings, which ponder the universe's most unanswerable questions. Each piece is a train of thought made tangible, braiding memories, curiosities, concepts, and other abstractions together into compositions overflowing with meaning. The intimacy of my work is reflected in its small scale, and its solemnity in the worn, ornate thrifted frames I trap it in. Flattened perspective, shimmering surface decoration, and continuous narrative storytelling are common features of my work. Often, I position young girls inside expansive, maze-like dreamscapes, emphasizing feelings of loss and helplessness, or awe and freedom. As a contextual anchor, excerpts from my personal journals are routinely incorporated. Metaphor and microcosm define my style. 

For me, the process of creation is automatic, visceral, and both messy and meticulous. My drawings, made almost exclusively from watercolors, inks, and colored pencil pigments, begin as words, phrases, and poems before acquiring visual identities. I create within a stream of consciousness framework and typically eschew reference photos in order to establish a personal distortion and filter the world through my eyes; my pieces depict reality not as it actually is or was, but as it felt or seemed to me at a point in time. Some works are melancholic, others sentimental, but all are deeply personal and entirely alive.  

My artistic calling is to create pieces that, more than just works of art, are blueprints, maps, timelines, diary entries, and notebook pages, each containing some fragment of truth in its contemplation of the nature of the universe, the passage of time, the boundaries of human imagination, and the energy that charges individual moments in a life. My drawings are not so much reflections of me as they are me; they are my mind turned inside out and put on display.