Biography
Stephanie Todhunter received a BA from Bowdoin College and did postgraduate work at the University of Minnesota. Her work was recently exhibited at the Kathryn Schultz, Maud Morgan, Galatea, and Abigail Ogilvy Galleries, and in the AREACODE Art Fair and Boston International Fine Art Show. She was awarded the Mozaik Future Art Award in 2020 by Mozaik Philanthropy Los Angeles and Artist of the Year 2017 by the Cambridge Art Association. Her work is held in private collections around the world.
Artist Statement
Stephanie Todhunter started working on the Latchkey Kids Project in 2014. The backbone of the series is an ongoing succession of plaster encased vintage dolls, each re-colored and re-named. Once the dolls have been plastered and inked, they develop distinct and often unsettling features and personalities. Stephanie takes a photographic portrait of each girl to capture and highlight these quirks. These portraits are used in larger pieces to tell stories about the lost girls. Common themes are isolation, stranger danger, missing children, parental neglect, and lord-of-the-flies-like adventure in small town suburbia.
In her most recent work, the Saints of the Drowned World rule over remains of bygone Apocalypses: Nuclear Winter, Cold War, Satanic Panic, Stranger Danger. They also rule over private childhood catastrophies: divorce, abuse, neglect and abandonment. The Saints are reminders that there have always been global catastrophies in the making as well as gentle guardians of our own very private and personal apocalypses. And a final reminder that catastrophic extinction events have always resulted in bursts of evolutionary change.