Cleo Stoutzker

Artists Statement

Stoutzker's work develops on a thematic basis in which she creates iterations of a given form or concept, evolving continuous bodies of work and symbolic motifs such as Head or Rock. 

This year her work has centred upon the metaphor, people as or like rocks, exploring the relationship between anthropocentric narratives of being in time and geological deep time. Interested in reducing a landscape to its fundamentals through an interplay of form in negative space, Stoutzker's figures are situated in flat and unidentifiable spaces which evade a sense of place. 

Stoutzker's metaphors further develop reimagine people as seeds then as maps, reflecting on the concept and word Diaspora, with focus on its etymology meaning to scatter or sow in ancient Greek. Shared histories and contested space are expressed in the differently characterised figures interwoven to create abstract topographies. Her unidentifiable and later symbolic landscapes explore diasporic geography and to what extent symbolic landscapes are generated in a collective consciousness. 

The underlying subject of all Stoutzker's work is process, viewing her paintings as aesthetic questions and answers which examine the ways in which we create knowledge and arrive at truth.

a.n Degree Show Guide 2024, pages 18-19