With a practice honoring the traditional use of figure ground relationship and formalistic approaches to creating solid, successful compositions, her work merges together a use of collage and highly saturated hues of paint. Her mark making is not left to chance, but rather follows formal elements of composition as she builds optical space into her paintings, sometimes pieces of fabric and paper can be found collaged into the different layers and blobs of paint. A discord system of painting can usually be found in her artwork; looking at the colour spectrum, instead of using the natural shade and order of the colours that can be found within the rainbow values, the value scale is instead flipped.

Painting in an abstract fashion, each piece is built compositionally with the goal of forcing ones eye to navigate itself in and out of planes of a frozen sliver of space and time. Building shapes and forms within that space she struggles to pull emotion not only out of the physicality of the marks made, but the negative space found between them. Her work is created by the focus and observation of layering to create the illusion of space/depth between forms and shapes. While painting, past marks eventually become covered up constructing a more substantial element of space, letting the ground expand, maybe becoming a new colour or turning into ground its’ self. Granting the marks that admittance to flip flop from one to another. This way she is working with the illusion of depth and examining the important relationships between line and space and what happens when they meet, creating a plain. These decisions made, the results hold the emotion. There is emotion in making the choice and when done well the results hold that energy.

The moment’s where plain meets line is of great importance and holds a strong focus and find it parallels other balances in the work such as being careful not to cross the line of overkill, playing the game of when its just enough and adding one stroke too many. This echo’s an inspiration that comes partly from the symbolic infrastructure of martyrs. The unavoidable fate of permanency, time and colour are sacrificed, being forced to lay still captured on canvas. The act of creating is at the same time destroying the safe moment of potential found in a clean slate. This freedom is given up in order to become permanent and infinite.

Stacey also draws inspiration form landforms found in nature. Moments such as when the earth meets with the sky creating an indestructible horizon line or following the contour of the edge or a cliff or mountain obtain great emotion as theses forced relationships are unbreakable even though vast space exists between each part. Her colour pallet source is no secrete but comes from the world that surrounds her - bright candy, food packaging, pallets already displayed in magazines, store front displays, partially any other media source. These details of her world collectively lead to a highly intense and greatly saturated pallet. She is not afraid to give in and let her simple attraction to each colour guide her.

Hints of recognizable imagery can sometimes be found in her paintings to act as a kind of doorway, a starting point into a new world of experience. Pictorial references can give certain moments in her work more accessibility, acting as trap doors that lead you into high chroma fields of paint, patterned fabrics and an original time of reflection When less can be more, the freedom and persistence of pigment over rule with my painting. A successful piece is a painting that still consists of motion. It lives as its self at the same time seems to be a slice from some other moment of space and time.


"The magic seems to me to be in the space, not in the objects. In a painting, space itself provides some of the emotional content; it is through that space that you feel things. If you are in Death Valley, standing there, one of the thrills you feel is spatial . . . the thrill is seeing a defined space, a finite space . . . It is the fact that it is a valley with edges round it that we can comprehend and we feel something, we feel small and at the same time filled with awe." - David Hockney