About
Visual artist Elizabeth Stone is drawn to the exploration of memory and time deeply rooted within the ambiguity of the photographic medium. Through the repurposing of her materials, she investigates the spontaneous aspects of transformation.
Over the last decade Stone has been questioning the dual aspects of photography. The negative and the positive demand equal attention as she considers the intrinsic aspects of truth and fiction in photography. In thinking about the whole, a constant interchange of destruction and creation drives her impulses in making.
Currently her work utilizes her analog materials to investigate the photograph as a three dimensional object. She seeks slow, time consuming practices that meld the hand and mind, decontextualizing and reinterpreting her materials. For the work Ecdysis, Stone cut over 3,000 of her 35mm color negatives, black and white negatives and color positives into single frames and then sewed them together in a non linear pattern. This large scale dimensional art piece references the action of shedding or casting off an exterior layer. It becomes an outer coat of memory and statement of self.
Between Forgetting and Knowing uses thousands of her 35mm negatives and positives, reshaped by heat and hung on filament. The structure and pattern of the installation is based on the mathematics of memory. In addition, the spontaneity of the cameraless chemigram process in the multi-piece grid, Channeled Scablands continues her inquiry into the ambiguity of the medium. Process drives Stone’s work as she continues to push and pull at the edge of what defines and how we see the photograph.
Stone has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries across the United States. Her work is held in collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Center of Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona, Candela Collection, Richmond, VA, Cassilhaus, Chapel Hill, NC, Nevada Museum of Art Special Collections Library, Center or Art + Environment, Reno, NV, and Archive 192, New York City, NY. Her work has been featured in numerous publications and online blogs, including Orion Magazine, BETA Developments in Photography, Lenscratch, The Whitefish Review, Diffusion Annual and The Curious Photo Blog.
Stone lives and works in rural Montana where the sky is indeed big and the grass tall.
Awards and Honors
Stone has been awarded multiple artist in residence fellowships including Cassilhaus, Ucross Foundation, Jentel Artist Foundation, Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, Virginia Center of Creative Arts and the National Park Service. These fellowships provide her with concentrated focus for creating original work while engaging in stimulating intellectual dialog with other artists.
Stone was a Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 winner in 2022 and in 2023 was awarded the inaugural Critical Mass Archive 192 award. Stone was second place winner in The National Best Contemporary Photography exhibition by the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in 2022. She was awarded the Montana Fellowship in 2019 from the LEAW Foundation which included an artist residency at the Virginia Center of Creative Art. She was also a finalist for the Clarence John Laughlin award in 2017, nominated for the Baum Award for Emerging American Photographer in 2016 and was awarded the top Portfolio Review Prize at PhotoNOLA 2013, her first review, which resulted in a solo show at the New Orleans Photo Alliance Gallery in 2014. She worked as an artist in schools from two grants from the Montana Arts Council in 2011 and received a Strategic Investment grant from the Montana Arts Council in 2020.
One minute video created for Medium Photo Festival 2022
