Artist Statement
Cyra Jane is a multi-media wielding powerhouse known best for her surreal stone carvings and large-scale community installations. Her work walks an edge between psychoanalysis and magical reality, that sweeps people into profound emotional response and psychological growth. A voracious creator and collector of skills, she has been a painter, blacksmith, installation artist, book designer, writer, singer, curator, and sculptress.
While her primary schooling was in Professional and Technical Writing, Cyra has pursued consistent training in the visual arts while developing her unique voice. She has been the recipient of a number of grants through Ignition Northwest, based out of Seattle, and a scholarship to Pratt Fine Arts Center. Cyra has held residencies with the James Washington Foundation in Seattle in 2010 and Studiostone in Vancouver, B.C. in 2016.
For the last few years, she has been focusing mostly on stone carving in chlorite and marble that take detail beautifully and has recently expanded into more challenging stones like basalt and brucite. With these carvings, she has delved deep into her subconscious, mapping content through the meditative practice of the art – into deep thought and reaction patterns on topics like the release of anger, the embrace of the self, the welcome gate, etc. Each requires between 70-120 hours of carving and meditation. The resulting works are evocative and deeply complicated, and yet ring through with a touch of her surreal sense of humor.
Cyra is passionate about the intersection between art and community and always finds herself working to create and maintain artistic communities. After spending 15 years living in downtown Seattle, she now lives and works on Vashon Island, managing an artists’ community in and among 17 acres of abandoned orchid greenhouses. She spent many years volunteering as an installation artist for Burning Man with a blacksmithing collective and for the regional burn event as the Burn Engineer, Event Producer, and an installation artist, managing a crew that built her own designs. She has for three years now been the Director of the International Stone Carving Symposium held in Washington and is a proud young leader in that vibrant community.