Stephanie Ford Forrester

Northland Harmony, 2022, textiles, painted cotton & batiks

“With formative years spent in coastal environments it is natural that these and other fragile, beautiful places settled permanently into my imagination ultimately providing guidance towards adult life in the visual arts. Studies at Mt. Allison University’s Department of Fine Arts and The New School of Art in Toronto were followed by travels in the U.K., Europe, Turkey, Afghanistan and India. Later came time living solo in the Gatineau Hills without electricity or a car. Numerous individual and group shows in the Ottawa area were the product of a very productive time exploring printmaking and early work in textiles.

Soon, the building of a family, several log and timber frame house reclamation projects and starting work in the Museum field took precedence.

A move to Lakefield in 1990, curatorship at Hutchison House Museum in Peterborough and raising teenagers encompassed most of that decade until returning to making art full time in late 1998 with textiles emerging as my medium of choice.

Several group and solo shows followed, as well as over 20 years on the Kawartha Autumn Studio Tour, commissioned work and participation in many fine art festivals.

Working in luminous silks, batiks, cottons and hand dyed and painted fabrics, my pieces are meditations on the transitory mysteries of our beautiful, breathing earth. The immediacy and delicacy of the extensive hand work I employ is a crucial part of my creative process reflecting that same fragile and elusive process I see and experience in nature.” – Stephanie Ford Forrester