An Interview with Stephanie Hill - Mixed Media
- MAC CAM
- 6 days ago
- 6 min read
Stephanie Hill's artistic roots trace to the life-filled wetlands of Cornwall, Ontario, where she grew up on the shores of the Saint Lawrence River. Surrounded by family, cousins, friends, and nature during formative summers at the family cottage, this immersive childhood profoundly shaped her enduring focus on relationships – both human and with the natural world.
A graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD), Stephanie deepened her practice through the college's off-campus program in Florence, Italy. Her European studies were further supported by the prestigious Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. For over 13 years, Stephanie has made her home and studio in Wakefield, Quebec, living on the Gatineau River downstream from her creative workspace.
Deeply embedded in her community, Stephanie is a founding member (of 11 years) and active board member of the not-for-profit Place des Artistes de Farrellton artists' coop. She brings her wealth of experience to audiences through leading community workshops and creating permanent public art installations.
Stephanie's work is a highly intuitive exploration employing oil on linen, watercolor, gouache, pen, and ink. She creates dreamlike worlds populated by water, trees, gardens, animals, and insects, exploring the profound connections between nature and humanity. Her art intuitively binds symbols with myth, facilitating a powerful expression of transformation with the experience of aliveness at its core. Through honed composition skills, she invites the beholder into a compelling dance between inner and outer worlds, embarking on a journey of self-discovery that reveals the ever-changing relationship between the world around us and the one within.
A renaissance aficionado inspired by early masters, Stephanie equally draws from comic books, the ink illustrations of John Tenniel and Edward Gorey, the paintings and etchings of Marc Chagall, the irreverence of Bugs Bunny and Mad Magazine, 100-plus-year-old dress catalog engravings, and the exquisite 16th-century botanical illustrations of Maria Sibylla Merian.
Stephanie's work, centering the enduring exploration of relationships and belonging, has been featured in private collections nationally and abroad. She has participated in a wide range of solo and group exhibitions, consistently offering viewers a delightful and revealing encounter with the interconnectedness of life.
What does community and cultural expression mean to you, particularly within this multicultural event?
Community means everything! I moved to Wakefield, Quebec, 15 years ago because I knew I could find community here, and I did in a big way. Our village has built a community center, a boardwalk, an arts association, a theater group, a literary festival, and on and on, almost exclusively through the hard work of local volunteers.
I am a founding member of an artist studio co-op (Place des Artistes de Farrellton, aka PAF) in an old elementary school just north of Wakefield. PAF is a small community of artists helping artists, and welcoming the local public into share the visual arts with them.
Creative communities everywhere are often perceived as outliers within the general population, and as a result we've had to become ingenious at creating our own opportunities.
Banding together has helped us not only survive, but often thrive. I truly feel that, in these dark and difficult times, the answer to our problems lies in creating community.
I'm very excited to meet the members of MAC-CAM's community and honoured to be a part of this multicultural event!
How did you make the transition from floristry to visual art?
I actually started out as an artist first. After graduating from the fine art program at OCAD in Toronto, I moved to Vancouver to join friends there and figure out how I could actually make a living in the visual arts. Long story short, I couldn't, so started casting out for day jobs I wouldn't hate doing.
My grandmother had been a prolific gardener and I'd loved her gardens growing up. It came to me that a job making bouquets at a busy flower market would fit my need for a job that was creative. Boy was it hard work!! Lugging large buckets of flowers in water, stripping leaves with constantly dirty hands, the work was endless, but I learned so much!
The most visceral moment of that job came when I smelled a particular purple tulip and was instantly transported in time to my Grandmother's garden. I realized in that moment that I'd inherited my love of nature from her.
Do you compose your art with an “arranger’s eye,” balancing elements like petals and stems?
In Fine Arts at OCAD I came to love the art of composition and this has become a foundation to every work I create, including in the rare instances when I still get to do flower arranging.
How do you think the cycle of growth and decay informs your creative perspective?
That's a hard question to answer. Growth and decay are in everything naturally. The best answer I can give is that I look at generations, particularly the things ancestors hand down to their descendants: I guess that perspective is more about cycles of wounding and healing.
What has working as a florist taught you about patience and timing in creation?
Honestly, although my creative process has definitely been informed by working as a florist, I'd say patience and timing have come down to my intuitive practice.
Early in my career, I started out working in oil paint, mostly, painting wet into wet and very quickly. I always started with a carefully worked out composition, but didn't know what colours or details I would use. I did that for a number of years: very big, very colourful, with underpainting colours coming through. But I started to have trouble with second-guessing myself and obsessively redoing areas before I'd filled in the rest of the painting.
I got so frustrated that finally I turned to water colour with oil pastel as a resist, which was really quick, and I could use the colour in a very saturated way: the result was that I could no longer rework areas and had to always trust my first idea. This new process trained me, through constant practice, to really trust my intuition. I would ask myself, “what colour is next?”, and I would have to go with the first one that came to me.
The interesting evolution of using watercolour is that over the last 10 years, my work has become more and more about detail and layering on colours with line work. I still paint in oil, but everything I do now is carefully planned out (still using intuition to guide any decisions) and the minutiae is incredibly important. I finally realized that this is the way I truly love working, and now see the whole thing as being meditative.
How do you choose which mythological, emotional, or memory-laden symbols to express in a piece?
I work completely intuitively and always ask myself: “what is it that you want to say?”, and my practice is to always trust and follow the answer I get. I feel like this is a type of spiritual practice, channeling answers from the universe.
In my experience, the resulting symbols, mythologies, and archetypes express profoundly complex concepts, and very often they stand in for emotional truths. Sometimes I don't even know what they mean, but my practice is to trust that they are meant to be there. And for imagery, I draw completely from my own life and my own experiences.
Both my parents are retired high school teachers who taught English, Art, Theater, and History, so my home growing up was filled with literature, art, plays, music, and on and on. I come from a big sprawling family and am still close to my parents, siblings, nieces, nephews, and cousins: I'm positive that, as a result, relationships factor heavily in my work.
I also have grown up on the St Lawrence River, surrounded by miles and miles of life-filled wetlands, so the natural world is a constant source of inspiration to me. In fact, I feel like it is a type of calling, given the climate crisis we face, to bring flora and fauna to the viewer in the hope that it helps them connect on a more profound emotional level to the natural world.
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