Stella Arion

After twenty years in fashion styling and art direction, Stella started working in ceramics and glass at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which she completed her first collection of sculptures and was accepted to study by The Royal College of Art’s Ceramics and Glass MA programme. Just before starting at the RCA, Stella completed a one-month artist’s residency at The Guldagergaard International Ceramics Research Centre (Denmark). 

During her MA studies, Stella won The Worshipful Company of Tin Plate Workers alias Wire Workers Award and the Charlotte Fraser Award. She was also shortlisted for a QEST scholarship. 

Stella’s work has been featured by The Royal Ballet, McQueen Couture, Istituto Marangoni, in the book ‘Dream Sequence’, by Conde Nast, at London Fashion week and The London College of Fashion.

Currently, she is completing the series 'Gardens of Love'. The next steps will be to set up a studio in London, travel the world exploring different residencies and cultures gathering inspiration for new work.

Only two things pierce the human heart.

One is beauty.

The other is affliction.

Life brings you affliction. This leaves a longing in your soul for beauty. But to find it, you must know it.

Simone Weil

Sculpture is how I channel inner visions and feelings that aren’t easily put into words. I explore beauty, pushing through conventional notions of what that term means. My work questions our perception of ‘beauty’ and ‘ugly’ as separate entities. They are, in fact, just like life and death - intrinsically linked.

Beauty, to my eye and in my work, encompasses sharpness and fragility, darkness and light, the grotesque and the sublime. Beauty can be seen in nature, both in the most vivid expressions of exuberant life and equally in the process of dying and decay, the transformation that is the essence of nature. 

Form and emotion are connected, too, and I explore the threads that link them. I examine human emotions and how we as human beings react to our feelings – how we express honestly and freely or, conversely, how we distort and suppress. 

I often reflect on one formative experience I had as a child, witnessing my grandfather dying of a terminal illness. It was my first reckoning with mortality, the first time I realised, though I could not express it then, that we are always transforming, moving from life towards death. My work is a continual exploration of that movement from one state to another. I seek to capture a wave of emotion, to unlock a moment for the viewer, to incite them to explore meaning within themselves. I hope that my work triggers something, perhaps reconnecting threads on some hidden inner map or provoking the viewer to embark upon a journey of introspection.