The series of paintings known as ‘Stone Stacks’ is a reflection on and purging of 10 years of the artist’s life during which Stefanie had to confront and process many raw emotional challenges. It all began with a game: choose one word to describe each year in the last decade, an honest summary of the overriding emotions of each of those 12 months. Each painting represents one of these years when the artist was struggling and battling for a way out of darkness. Every canvas is a landmark of soul-searching, burying unwanted emotions and remnants of pain, and collectively these paintings become a pilgrimage back to her inner gravity and truth.

Stone Stacks, also known as Cairns or Rock Stacks, are mounds of stones balanced precariously on top of one another in seemingly physically impossible positions, with gravity playing a key role in the success of the structure. The act of stacking stones is a practice of great patience, huge physical effort and concentration, thereby translating into a vehicle for meditation and problem solving. Each rock can have a significant representation ranging from thankfulness or a gesture of worship, to the purging of emotions and to deep catharsis, stone by stone.

Stefanie uses the symbolism of the stone stacks to portray these difficult steps, with the luxury of hindsight, which enables her to break them down to simplified, abstracted elements of fragmented shape, form and colour, thereby expressing the fractious nature of the inner struggle, the frustrating absence of clarity at the time. They become a literal depiction of the expression ‘piecing it all together’.

The paintings use energetic colour combinations and undulating, intertwining oversized brushstrokes that appear to vibrate against one another as if in a trance-like, rhythmic dance, challenging the viewer to take part in this intoxication emotionally whilst also recognizing that there is something intangible in the fragility and imbalance the paintings portray.

Compositions begin life as simple, recognizable stacks of precariously balanced stones, their placement on the canvas awkward and slightly claustrophobic. Stefanie then decorates these structures with kaleidoscopic colour palettes representative of the complicated, difficult memories she is expressing and her attempts to purge the soul of an elaborate mosaic of intertwining, painful emotions which are never, ever just black and white.

With wide sweeping brushstrokes she binds and stitches them together to stabilize them visually and symbolically. She transforms what was an uncomfortably unbalanced composition into a solid, confident celebration. She uses a generous ‘white-wash’ to pick up the colours of the semi-wet canvas beneath and imbue the image with bold highlights that lend an air of triumph, relieving the eye of the darkness beneath. Contrasting ‘stitches’ are introduced at the end to ensure balance and just the right amount of visual tension. It is a finely tuned process of ‘create and destroy’ which requires large doses of courage and risk.