Stacey Durand studied printmaking and art education at Montserrat College of Art and earned her Master of Arts in Teaching Art from Salem State College.
After living on the North Shore for nearly ten years, Durand returned home to New Hampshire, settling in the Seacoast, where she currently lives and works. She is the Gallery Manager of the Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy, an exhibition and teaching space that embraces curatorial risk-taking and highlights the work of contemporary artists. Durand is a practicing artist and has exhibited her paintings and collages in several galleries throughout New England, and her work is held in private collections across the country. She is also the mom of a creative and sassy 7-year-old daughter and a slightly crazy yellow Labrador retriever.
“My work has been greatly influenced by the places I have lived and the communities I have called home. Over the years, I have explored many seacoast and mill towns throughout New England and find myself drawn to the regional character of these communities. These neighborhoods are often filled with old homes and buildings packed tightly together, creating interesting, crowded arrangements and compositions. I fell in love with the way these buildings relate to one another; the houses on some streets are nearly on top of each other, they are so close. Power lines cross the sky and zigzag over the streets to connect the buildings, and tilted telephone poles lean into warped houses.
These overlapping homes and quirky neighborhoods have become the subjects of my work, as I am drawn to the layers and connections these environments create. I work from photographs of actual communities, exploring the streets in search of interesting compositions and exaggerated examples of the types of buildings and neighborhoods I find compelling. Through collage, I layer and overlap images I have taken to discover connections between buildings that do not exist in the real world. These newly created collaged landscapes become slightly abstracted compositions. Through the process of removing buildings and neighborhoods from their original context and combining them with different environments, I create new connections, relationships, and ultimately, new communities.
I then paint over these collages in acrylic and often incorporate graphite and additional layers of collage. I continue the image from the front of my paintings onto the sides of each piece, giving the impression that the landscape extends beyond the front surface. By using this technique, I want my paintings to be viewed more as objects than as traditional paintings hung on a wall, enabling viewers to interpret these newly created communities with a sense of familiarity and a personal connection to their own neighborhoods.”