Fiber Sculpture with Stephanie Metz
Stephanie Metz, “InTouch” exhibit at Mesa Contemporary Arts Center Fall 2024
An Exciting Update
A new addition to the 2025 Willow Pond workshop calendar is an upcoming workshop with Stephanie Metz. Metz is a California artist who creates alluring yet unsettling sculptures and installations using wool as her medium. This unique and wonderful workshop takes place on August 15th -18th, 2025, and is aimed at intermediate and advanced students who want to focus their practice on using form and structure. Sampling multiple ways to take three-dimensional needle felting to the next level. Stephanie's workshop incorporates techniques from other sculpture traditions (working in clay, carving stone, and joining metal) to reframe the process of needle felting. In her work, Metz manipulates fiber to create objects that are both seductive and repulsive, muscular and elegant.
Her tactile process of “wool drawings” and fiber sculptures involves hand stitching thick industrial felt and repetitive needle felting of wool fibers into solid masses. Metz creates forms ranging from intimately sized to monumental. Her works embody nuanced, contradictory ideas in approachable yet mysterious materials. Her visceral organic sculptures—physically and conceptually both soft and edgy—reference the body as both subject and object. Her process and entire body of work a full of intricacy and intrigue and this workshop is likely to fill quickly.
About the Artist
Stephanie Metz is an American artist born in 1976 and holds a BFA in Sculpture from the University of Oregon; she lives with her techie husband and two sons in San Jose, California, where she works from a studio at The Alameda Artworks downtown. She has been featured in publications including San Jose's Content Magazine, Adobe Inspire Magazine, American Craft, and 500 Felt Objects. Her work has been included in the Rijswijk Textile Biennial in the Netherlands as well as Sculptural Felt International and Black Sheep, touring exhibitions that visited Europe and Australia. Her notable group exhibitions include FiberArt International at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and the Museum of Quilts and Textiles in San Jose, Formex Stockholm 2008 in Sweden, and Transmission: Experience at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore. In 2015 she was honored as an Artist Laureate by Silicon Valley Creates, and she is a recipient of a mysterious and wonderful Belle Foundation for Cultural Development grant as well as two Center for Cultural Innovation grants and an Honorable Mention for the International Sculpture Center’s Innovator Award.
Stephanie’s recent solo exhibition at the Triton Museum, Santa Clarita, California, featured a series of evocative fiber sculptures that explore themes of soft power, aesthetic perception, and the paradoxes of female life through the use of wool felt, body-like forms and the color pink.
Her Fall 2024 exhibition “ In Touch” ran most recently from Sep 13 - Jan 26, 2024, at Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum. In Touch consisted of two groupings of fiber sculptures that invited physical touch by viewers. White cocoon-like ‘Hanging Pods’ and grey and tan organic ‘Holdable’ floor sculptures each offer intriguing opportunities for connection with the art—and with other viewers.
