'Alchymia'

Brenda Stumpf makes art to conjure the mysterious and enchanted — to dive into the dark and hide in the secretive. As she works, she is often feeling her way towards something that seems deep, ancient, and timeless by way of the abstract and symbolic.

Working intuitively, Stumpf does not plan or sketch her ideas prior to creating. She has a compulsion to make intricate use of nontraditional and found materials in a way that is akin to alchemy — imbuing them with and transmuting them to an elevated sense of meaning, whether on intimate or physically massive scales.

Stumpf’s work has referenced female historic and mythic figures such as Pandora, Seshat, the Black Madonna, Hatshepsut, the victims of Jack the Ripper, and the women of the Inquisitions. She has also delved into her personal history, playing with nostalgia and memory, and she continues to be inspired by the works of composer Arvo Pärt and the poetry of Pablo Neruda and Rainer Maria Rilke.

From Stumpf’s perspective, there is profound healing in the creation of art; it provides the transcendent conditions necessary to understanding and mending one’s life and ancestral lineage as well as relieving the collective pain body. For her, creating art is a mystical and alchemical process, and she works within a shamanic environ that transcends time and space.