Animal Sculptures From a Cabinet of Curiosity
Gin Stone’s greatest fear: boredom
PROVINCETOWN INDEPENDENT
BY JOHN GREINER-FERRIS AUG 3, 2022
The artist Gin Stone defies labeling, which is what makes her and her work so intriguing. One might say it is multidisciplinary, perhaps sculptural; but those terms only skim the surface of what’s behind her art. What one clearly sees is that her sculpture and arras, which will be on display for a week starting Aug. 5 at On Center Gallery in Provincetown, are the inevitable product of a self-described “huge nerd.”
“Growing up, I wanted to be Indiana Jones’s kid,” she says.
Her studio space is as much a cabinet of curiosity as it is a workspace for making art. A mostly self-taught artist, Stone is also self-taught in the ways of the world — scientific, religious, and philosophical — and she continues to follow her own innate curiosity and imagination wherever they lead her.
The titles of her animal sculptures are genus and species names paired with what inspired her, such as penicillin. But her arras are inspired by the brushwork of the painter Joan Mitchell and the quilts by Gee’s Bend, an isolated African-American hamlet in Alabama. Her greatest fear isn’t on the list of typical artist anxieties: Will I get a show? Will they like my work? Stone fears getting bored.
“When I get bored, I move on,” she says.
Stone started by studying painting at Hartford Art School. “I had a scholarship to go to an all-girls art school, but my mother wanted me to get a liberal arts degree,” she says. “It was like being in high school all over again. There were jocks, and the artists were the weirdos.” After two years, she dropped out.
But she really wasn’t a painter anyway, even though she was achieving a certain amount of what some people might consider success. “I had this show in Los Angeles, and I had to go around and talk about my work,” she says. “I realized I had nothing to say; I wasn’t invested in it.” She had what she calls “painter’s block.”
In the 1990s, still painting, Stone worked by day as a graphic designer in Manhattan until 9/11, which shook her to her core.
“I couldn’t be in New York anymore,” she says. “My landlord came home covered in dust. I would be in Port Authority and pass all the missing person signs, and I couldn’t take it.”
