Lives and works in Glasgow, having spent most of her early years and education in the Middle East. Most recently she has completed her Phd in Fine Art practice, with a specialism in performance at The Glasgow School of Art. Since 2010 she has toured her work nationally and internationally to festivals and galleries in the UK, Berlin, Lithuania, Finland and Chicago. In 2011, she received the Athena Award by New Moves International and National Review of Live Art, Glasgow. Stephanie was also mentored by the late drag King pioneer Diane Torr.
She has a well-established facilitation practice, which is vital to the way she makes, researches and produces new work. Her most recent workshop was at Glasgow Sculpture Studios, looking at the ‘Body as Sculpture’. Stephanie is interested how an object can change her interaction and intimacy with others, creating visual and poetic scores to act as a dramaturgical key to unlocking subject-matter or narratives for performance. Her work situates between a physical and sculptural practice, developing live and documented performative outcomes where sound, movement, image, object, light and costume intersect. Stephanie engages with performance as a way to explore the relationship between body and space, especially around gender and sexuality. She uses the body as a tool for measurement and is interested in the ‘extended body’ and ‘body as object’ to consider questions around ‘the self’, ‘the other’ and ‘the theatrical’.
Stephanie Black Daniel’s residency was commissioned by the British Council and Creative Scotland under the Open Bodies Residency programme, designed jointly by Despina and The Fruitmarket Gallery. More information here.
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Curatorial statement, by Guilherme Altmayer
Stephanie Black-Daniels has been investigating ways to extend the female body through fabricated, sculptural garments and wearable forms. Through actions made with these creations, the artist explores the limits of her own body’s capability so as to think about the relationship between all of our bodies and the spaces they present in. Her work approaches a discussion of gender and sexuality in performance shot through with connotations of chastity, sensuality and savagery. For her first visit to Brazil, and Despina residency, the artist voiced her intention to note respectfully the territory she would be operating in. She arranged one-on-one workshops called “In the City, Performing Women” with four female-identified individuals she connected to through an open call. Working through conceptions of rituals and savagery, identity and surface, rhythms and sexuality, the seven-hour long encounters held the possibility of intense exchange: of experiences, of knowledge of the local terrain, and of each participant’s performance practice. The artist and collaborators negotiated the dissimilarities and affinities of their bodies, their aesthetic and/or political distance, and through these transatlantic encounters that they enacted, expanded territory has been claimed.
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Pictures Gallery (horizontal scrolling)
by Frederico Pellachin
