My name is SK Steen and I am an artist currently based in Birmingham, Alabama. I am originally from Nashville, Tennessee where I grew up with my parents, brother, sister, and five dogs. I graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of Alabama in May of 2024 and received my BFA with concentrations in printmaking and drawing.

My artistic practice serves as a way for me to process my emotions and lived experience. As I do this, I also create new possibilities and solve problems regarding the creation process and my personal life. Through processes of abstraction and figuration within abstraction I relinquish control to uncover and convey what I cannot find the words for. My work has a preoccupation with the human figure that I augment via texture, color, layering, and patterning. I use a combination of drawing and printmaking processes across a variety of media to achieve this.

In truth, however, the work is not about the human figure itself, but about depicting human experience. The human form serves as a narrative conduit to explore past events in my life, current emotions, and the world surrounding me. Recurrent themes include the experience of womanhood and femininity, spirituality, childhood and memory, family ties, and a grappling with identity through these lenses. My work also aims to enhance beauty in a way I find interesting; this simultaneously conveys my inner world and creates a small reality that is more beautiful and “perfect” than the one I exist in. Nick Cave describes this impulse in his 30-year survey Forothermore as “using beauty, adornment, and embellishment as a way of resistance” or a “vibrant and dazzling insistence that those conditions do not have to be the ones with which we operate.”

To prepare for my work, I keep a sketchbook where I explore ideas through writing, sketching, and collaging. I also take photographs of things I find inspiring as I move through the world, which can be used as either a reference picture or a jumping off point for future work. Some of these things include dogs, worms, plant life, and living spaces of friends and family. I am also drawn to archetypal imagery like mythological characters, or angels and devils. In the pieces themselves, I use bright colors and detailed mark-making techniques such as stippling and cross-hatching. By using multiple mediums such as printing ink, charcoal, watercolor, and textiles I vary the opacity in each layer to create a sense of depth. The variation in materials and opacity is also a compositional tool that emphasizes figures or patterns to move the eye through the work. I often use a busy, all-over composition with small details to make the work feel very zoomed in or out. Either way, it creates a visual field that completely encompasses the audience’s attention. When depicting the human form, I often exaggerate or displace bodily features to distort typical perception.

Although my work is often self-serving, my goal is that viewers will find an emotional connection. I find answers to questions I have been asking about life as I work, and I hope to bring that same release to my audience. I attempt to do this in certain pieces by working with methods of automatic drawing that access the subconscious. This often involves using watercolor inks in random formations on wet paper and then drawing what I see in micron pen. By creating odd figures in this way and leaving areas that are not specifically defined, I allow viewers the freedom to look for what they need to see, whether I have specifically outlined it or not. This method creates a collaboration between artist and viewer that brings the meaning of the work beyond my own intentions.