Stella Moon

SAIC SHOWS 2023 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Graduates

SAIC SHOWS 2023 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Master of Fine Arts in Studio, Sculpture

Stella Moon is a sculptor and installation artist currently based in Chicago, born in Los Angeles and raised in rural Oregon. She received her BFA from the University of Notre Dame in 2020. Her practice is process-based and focuses on repetition, geometric tessellations, patterns, and ritual, and she primarily explores labor-intensive ways of working with paper and fibers.

Untitled, 2021, Paper, Four 3 x 5 x 2 in. boxes

Untitled (Weaving), 2022, Hand-dyed handwoven cotton and synthetic fibers, 12 x 72 in.

Untitled (Comfort Women), 2021, Paper and wire, 72 x 94 in.

Sensitive content warning: During World War II, the Japanese military kidnapped and forced up to 400,000 young girls around the age of 13 into brothels where soldiers would repeatedly rape them. These girls are now referred to as comfort women and were mostly from Korea as well as China and other countries. Each girl would be raped everyday from 8am to 5pm by up to 60 soldiers a day for several years. The young girls were beaten or murdered if they resisted. They were often raped to death, or they died of STDs or they committed suicide. They were unable to walk and left with scars on their bodies from when the Japanese would remove their uterus so they couldn’t get pregnant. The ones who did make their way back home had to keep quiet about it, or they would be shamed and outcast. Many of these remaining women spoke up after years of being silent, finally gaining the courage to fight for justice. All they asked was for the Japanese government to issue a formal apology. However Japan has still not apologized. They have tried to cover up this history by removing it from textbooks. They’ve also been removing memorials and statues from all around the world. We are running out of time. There are only less than twenty of these women who are still alive in Korea. We need to get them justice.

Acceptance, 2022, Hand-dyed handwoven cotton, 50 x 100 in.

Acceptance is a weaving I lost control over during the making process. This piece marks the start of a new and different path in my work, one where I begin accepting the things that I don’t necessarily have full control over. I recently accepted that I have ADHD, despite being diagnosed with it several years prior. Accepting the diagnosis recently opened my eyes to a completely different perspective of my life, and suddenly, everything had even more clarity. I no longer viewed the diagnosis as having something wrong with me or being a flaw or imperfection but decided to try to understand and love myself for who I am. Acceptance was coincidentally created during that same time of realization and self-acceptance, so it is a significant piece to my personal journey. The weaving did not turn out the way I expected at all, and I was initially displeased, but rather than discarding the piece as I would have done in the past, I was able to view it as a completely new work and be open to adjusting my set expectations.

Untitled, 2021, Paper, 76 x 100 in.

I’m drawn to geometric tessellations and repetitive, labor-intensive processes with rules or constraints I set for myself to work under. I mostly work with folding paper patterns as a way to find clarity through orderly structure and ritual. I’ve also recently been getting into fibers, specifically weaving, as the process delivers a similar sense of repetition and control while stepping away from rigidity.

Back to group

More graduates