Jane Stevenson

Jane Woodward Stevenson is a Buffalo, N.Y.-based artist whose work bridges the gaps between fine art, design, and architecture. Born in 1966 in Los Gatos, CA, she traveled extensively as a child with her family (her mother is a painter and her father an engineer) throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, and lived in Ethiopia.

Stevenson earned a BA (1990, Media Study) and MAH (1995, Interdisciplinary Humanities) at the University at Buffalo. Her studies focused primarily on filmmaking, photography, art history, critical theory, and literature, including a year abroad at Scuola Lorenzo di Medici in Florence, Italy. In 2012 she completed the Art Education Post Baccalaureate teacher certification program at Buffalo State College. Her graduate program at UB included a teaching fellowship in the Media Study department where she taught basic experimental filmmaking in Super 8 and a survey history of experimental film. There she was influenced by ideas developed by experimental film artist, Paul Sharits, notable for pushing boundaries in the way media can be used to convey meaning. 

After graduate school Stevenson shifted her focus towards sculptural art that inhabits and shapes a space, rather than composing space within film media. Beginning in 1995, guided primarily by self-taught methods, she began to design and build experimental and functional works of art using wood as the primary medium but incorporating other craft media such as metal, stone, art glass, and lighting fixtures.  In 2002, Stevenson established her own studio practice in an historic warehouse space in Buffalo, where she worked on commissions and projects. Her professional activities have included art installation for private collectors, exhibit design, and fabrication for museums. 

Stevenson’s work takes an approach to wood and mixed media material that frames the very unique graphic qualities of wood grain, pattern, and surface to act as metaphors in a large-scale object. Inspired by abstract expressionism, she composes grain pattern and surface contours to conjure a large-scale directional flow, conducted through measured and repetitive architectural units. Stevenson stresses the analogy to the still frames of a film when cutting wood. She proposes that the geometric units (or the “cuts”) in a material structure can produce a visual narrative sequence. She arranges pattern in such a way as to lend editorial coherence and thematic unity to the complex and abundant organic movements in natural material, light, and color.

Stevenson’s one-of-a-kind pieces are typically inspired by distinctive wood specimens that she finds. They are in private collections in Saudi Arabia, Michigan, and Buffalo, as well as the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo.

For more information on Jane Woodward Stevenson, including examples of her work, visit http://janestevensondesign.com/