Artist Statement (2021),  Keiyona C. Stumpf

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The infinite repertoire of natural phenomena, their inherent conformity to laws and their forces of growth and decay are an inexhaustible source of inspiration for me.

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In an organic/abstract vocabulary of forms, I endeavour to make the essence of beeing alive tangible. Order and chaos as original principles of life form a starting point for both form and content. Alien yet strangely familiar-seeming forms experience diverse metamorphoses in my sculptures and installations or find their subtle balance between stability and instability in round, flowing silhouettes.

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Guided by feeling and intuition, I allow the works to grow from an interplay of concrete ideas and reactions to random changes in the making process itself. The works thus always seem driven by an inner dynamic and a potential for change is inherent to them.

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They should not be understood as amere imitation of nature but rather as an expression of individual experience and interpretation of natural principles and laws.

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They play with the viewer´s sense of beauty and question the individual norms an presets of one´s own perceptions.

The naturally beautiful is not regarded as something perfect here but as an expression of a creative process that is able to touch our own realities to connect us with the most fundamental principles of our existence.

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Ultimately humankind and nature do not stand seperate from each other as a pair of opposites. Nature is not only the basis of our existence, we are "nature" and bear all its principles in us.

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I hope that through my works I may be able to speak to this uplifting sense of aliveness in some of us an thus to re-pose the question of beauty, dynamism and change.