Stangoe, Val

Val Stangoe is a self taught Scottish encaustic artist living in Cumbria who abstracts simple  images from nature. In this current series she plays with the image of a handful of pebbles in water and through repetition explores stillness and movement, light and dark, solidity and liquidity. Val says, ‘Pebbles appear so slight as to be almost insignificant compared to humanity and yet the smallest of them existed long before us and will continue to exist after we’re gone.’  Val’s images offer the viewer both a suggestion, to appreciate the small things in life, and a question, ‘How much of your life do you choose and how much is it shaped by external forces?’ Working in encaustic fits Val’s process perfectly by allowing her to move between creating encaustic monotypes ‘in the moment’ as well as to work in a more lengthy way on wood by building and scraping back of layers of wax and colour before the final image emerges.