Kathleen Houston-Stokes

Ms. Houston-Stokes has a BS (1978) and a Masters degree (1995) from The Ohio State University. She has been sculpting for nearly two-dozen years. For 20 years Ms. Houston-Stokes had been a critical care nurse at The Ohio State University Hospital. Ms. Houston-Stokes’ principal medium is the foundational material of all living beings – stone. However, she also works in glass, wood, and metal. Her sculpture has been exhibited in galleries and private collections throughout the Midwest United States. The artist’s work has been influenced by her health care career as well as by her close connection with the natural world. When not sculpting in her Columbus studio, Ms. Houston-Stokes spends time with her Weimaraner, paints and does ceramics.

Artist’s Statement: The medium of stone has been especially rewarding for me, although I have worked with clay, bronze, optical glass, metal and wood. Stones have participated in several states of Life before becoming sculpture. Rock is sacredly old with symbolically held spiritual wisdom and a potential to communicate contradictory softness, sensuousness, courageous vulnerability, and strength. As I work it is an experience of meditation, receiving something from the earth, I feel privileged. I listen, the stone teaches, I pass it along in the forms I create. The tangible dimension of stone sculpture is the intimate and spiritual vehicle of my creativity and communication.

Sacred symbols of Life are my subject matter. Abstracted, organic bone and leaf shapes resonate natural evolutionary and metamorphic change. Life is a precious experience; it is in natural order and as it “should be”. There is freedom and peace in this acceptance. So…”Trust through the pain of Life” “Have hope it’s all really okay” “Have peace within, relax, be calm, trust, love more in the present.” My subjects communicate a positive message of survival, growth, fertility or birth of new selves.

The technical process of direct carving can begin simply with taking a walk outdoors or as complex as transcending visual reality as I sit in front of the material, capturing what O’Keeffe called “the unexplainable thing in nature”. That unexplainable thing in nature is the wonder of the world around us; I connect to that as a part of my process. Moore said the real work of art is in some sense a concentration of the “vital force.” My process is about getting down to that basic vital force of form, or spiritual characteristic, its truth. I make sketches then draw directly on the stone with paint to find that force. I use air hammers and diamond saws; as well as hand pitching hammers, chisels, rasps, sandpaper and muscle power.

Love of nature motivates me to abstraction, through which I communicate on a visceral, intuitive and spiritual level. I am inspired by objects and elements of nature: a river bed, bones, leaves, rocks, feathers, animals, cloud formations, and trees; by forces that occur: a light breeze, storms, currents in water, fire, and the decay and growth of living matter. These are things directly connected to the universal spirit of our existence. I believe the more we as humans are connected and reminded of this vital force the more peace and contentment we will experience.