Stephanie Province is perhaps Overton’s best known conceptual artist. She has worked single-mindedly over the last 4 years developing a new body of abstract artworks that encompass sculpture, painting, printmaking and installation. Whilst these pieces are embodiments of emotions and experiences drawn from her personal life journey, they also engage the observer with universal questions about the human condition.

Stephanie Province was born in 1963 in Kent but spent a significant part of her childhood living in the Middle East.

I recognise the lasting impact my earliest experiences had on me. They are enmeshed with what concerns me now as an adult and in the way I work as an artist. Combing the beaches for ‘remnants’ near my current home here in Lancashire connects me to my 5 year old self – the thrill of finding some ‘treasure’ such as a porcupine quill or a discarded snake skin in the desert landscape.

Province studied Fine Art and then Ceramics at college but soon dispensed with the conventional approaches she was taught and began using her own methods and any available media that met her creative needs.

During the 1990s, Province became interested in the therapeutic value of art making within a clinical setting. In 1993 she qualified as an Art Therapist launching a career that was to last almost 20 years.

In 2013, Province began a 2½ year journey travelling the waterways of England and Wales on a narrowboat. This nomadic lifestyle developed her ability to be adaptive and attuned to an environment which was continually changing. A scavenger by nature, she often incorporated tow path debris in the artworks she made in her tiny boat studio.

In 2015 she returned to land and now uses a static caravan as her studio where she can work on less fleeting and larger scale pieces.

My studio is a cocoon where I can explore internal maps and immerse myself in creative journeys of discovery.

For many years, Province has experimented with household DIY materials in her paintings and used all manner of found objects and matter, including her own hair, in her sculptures. Perpetually building up each surface, working with it, applying fillers, grout and colour, she then sands much of this away, paring it down to reveal surprising textures and surface effects.

Circles and spheres dominate her personal vocabulary holding the obvious symbolic references to self. The circle within the square frequently features as a reference to the artist within her environment.

Every circle is a little story and my surrounding environment shapes my story.

Along with the importance of her surrounding environment, Province also reaches into the depths of her unconscious for source material. Her journeys continually shift inwards and outwards demonstrating an ongoing investigation of the relationship between her internal and external existence which can be complex and difficult to pin down. The tension between life and death is often present.

For me, an artwork gives tangible form to an idea, experience or emotion. It is my voice and my response to being in the world.