Stephanie Kilgast, an artist who is best known for her sculptures on trash or thrift objects, has been sculpting professionally since 2008. In her latest "book series", she has created miniature worlds of fungi, flowers, and mushrooms on the pages of some vintage books.
Recently, she shared her ideas and inspirations in an interview with DeMilked. She says, "The sculptures on book series has started in 2020, though it is a branch of my ongoing work on discarded objects." Scroll below to continue reading the interview and to check out some of her recent works that explore beautiful ecosystems using books as the canvas.
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Stephanie Kilgast
Stephanie also shared how she started her art journey- "The first 8 years I did replicas of food in miniature, but had a turn in 2015, when I sculpted one different fruit or vegetable every day to talk about the environmental impact of meat consumption and to visually show all the edible plant options."
"Then, I searched for ways to talk about the environmental impact of humanity and finally ended up with the idea of creating nature inspired environments onto trash around 2017 and later environments onto objects.", she adds.
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Stephanie Kilgast
The artist believes that each medium feeds the other. "The better I draw, the better I sculpt and vice-versa.", she says. Emphasizing the fact that she has not restricted herself to a specific art form, she mentions, "I also paint a lot in ink and watercolor and more recently in oils. I like to switch between mediums as each has different challenges but also comes with advantages. Sculptures are difficult because they come with the limits of physics, things can break if too thin or not flexible enough. The difficulty in painting is to get the correct shadows and composition."
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Stephanie Kilgast
Talking about her creative process and workflow, Stephanie says, "I just get up everyday and work. I follow ideas and try to complete them until I’m satisfied. It’s mostly about pushing things around until the artwork is coherent. Sometimes it’s fast and an artwork is done in a week, sometimes it takes month. It’s a weird job, creating, it can be difficult and you have to very disciplined, but I would not trade it with anything else."
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Stephanie Kilgast
In addition to creating things for pure joy, Stephanie also does a lot of side work for financial reasons, like teaching art online, having a YouTube channel, and updating her social media. She says, "That takes quite some time, and isn’t as fun, but in a way, it’s also a break from the pure creation process and forces you to use your brain differently."
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