Today we’d like to introduce you to Stephanie Mcgovern

Hi Stephanie, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?

I grew up 50 miles north of San Francisco in a small town. From a young age I knew I wanted to spend my life pursuing a creative career. As far back as I can remember I have been an artist, there was never a time where I wasn’t making art. To this day I can’t hold a pen and pad of paper in my hand without doodling (makes for very interesting meeting notes in my professional life).

I attended an arts focused high school and my time there was spent in the theater arts program. I loved performance, it was the one space where I felt I could really express myself. There I learned the art of stagecraft and acting. My senior year production was the 1990 play Dancing at Lughnasa. In preparation for my role as one of the four Mundy sisters, I learned to knit with my fellow cast mates. It was this moment that first exposed me to the world of textiles and the possibilities of yarn.

After high school I didn’t have much direction or guidance, so being left to my own devices I mostly followed my intuition. It’s not like today where there is a huge network of information available online to help build your own path. It was clear to me if I wanted to get anywhere then I needed to uproot to a city. San Francisco being so close was an exciting stepping stone into adult life.

I moved to San Francisco as a transfer student to SFSU in 2011. I was set to begin studying textiles as fine art, and had the hopes of finding opportunities to pursue acting on the side.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?

Moving to a city in my early 20’s was exhilarating, I felt that I was finally going to be able to set my path and see how far I could go. But three weeks after moving, I received a phone call that my father had suddenly died. The details of his passing being horrific and tragic, changed the trajectory of this new journey I had just set off on.

My father was the major financial support system for our family. Our income came from his workers comp and disability benefits. When he passed away, not only did we lose him, but my mother’s sole income. I grew up very quickly from that point on. I worked multiple jobs and attended school full time in a new city. All the while I was grieving in separation from my mother and brother, who were holding their own lives together in the wake of my father’s passing.

During my time in university I began working in bars to help cover my expenses, and once graduated I continued to work in the nightlife industry while maintaining a studio practice. Performance was a thing of the past, something I dreamed of but wasn’t sure if I would ever pursue in my life. Art felt like something that wasn’t moving for me in San Francisco, and I had vague ideas of going to graduate school in NYC. So after a year of planning and saving I made the move to New York in 2016 when I was 26.

I was in a new city, working in one of the World’s 50 Best Bars, but the same problems seemed to trail me. I felt trapped in an industry that was supposed to be a means to an end, but slowly it was becoming everything. I spent my first year in the city not making much art, but instead working three jobs, one of which was an unpaid internship that gave me some new skills to possibly find a new line of work in the field of art.

I started working in arts administration as an office assistant in late 2017, and from there everything that is good in my life today I can trace back to making that important step. I gained community, a network of other creatives, roommates, opportunities to showcase my work and receive a Master’s degree in Fine Art. There are still plenty of struggles that come up, and too many in the past to count, but today they feel more like hills compared to the once daunting mountains.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?

Once I began working in the field of arts administration and education, everything in my practice opened up in ways I never expected. I suddenly had the space and energy to explore performance again, and break into a world of experimental performance art and entertainment. I began performing at the House of Yes at their amateur burlesque nights in 2019, and found myself in a community of performers. I became interested in the ways my gender identity as a woman was defined by society, and began to construct long durational performances around my ideas and experience in the world. I would cross my performances with my studio practice by bringing performative materials into the studio, and create props to be used on-stage.

Today I focus predominantly on a studio practice based on fiber sculpture, assemblage and textiles. It’s important as an artist to find the through line of your way of making. When I look at my work from ten years ago, I can see how my sentiment of making has only expanded and become more refined. I love craft, I love the technicality of constructing a textile, the history and tradition, and the contemporary possibilities for the medium. Looking around the art world today I’m really excited by what I see other fiber artists producing. I feel inspired by form more than ever, and in the past few years have realized I’m more of a sculptor than anything else.

Working with yarns and 3-dimensional forms has become a sort of therapy for processing locked emotions in my body. I have a tendency to produce mass and create works that are dense and layered with different kinds of material. I have periods in the studio where it feels like I’m trying to bring the inside to the outside, to learn something about myself or what I’m trying not to feel. My father comes up frequently in these moments, and I see a lot of the forms I make as that grief still manifesting itself.

What were you like growing up?

I was a very sweet child. I know that I had a lot of kindness that was passed down to me from my parents. I was incredibly sensitive and imaginative, and I spent a lot of time drawing. I enjoyed getting lost in my imagination, whether that was through play time with toys, music or drawing.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://stephaniemcgovern.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stephanie.mcgovern.studio/

Image Credits

Image Credit Nico James