Artist Statement
As an interdisciplinary artist, I work across media to investigate my family history, my Christian faith, and the challenges of sustaining spiritual practice in an erratic world. Identifying the foundations of my artistic voice has required discipline, reflection, and emotional maturity. The unexpected passing of my mother, Katherine Doraella Steverson, in October 2021 significantly shifted my practice. To navigate my grief, I developed the philosophy of R.A.G.E.E.—resilience, acceptance, grief, and emotional exploration. As I matured this framework, it deepened my spiritual connection with my mother through visual art, meditative dialogue, and inherited relics such as her annotated Bible. R.A.G.E.E. has created space to examine my experiences through textile sculptures, video, and mixed-media objects, as I began channeling a voice for buried traumas, offering healing for myself and others with complex emotional histories.
Documentation of my mental state, social and environmental interactions inform the interconnection between subconscious thought, recounted memories, and common occurrences from my past and present. Utilizing this information and the teachings of my mother to make sense of the decisions and details that make up my work. This documentation is shaped through journal entries, mind mapping, and storing objects from various locations. Found objects are treated as “time trackers” within my work as I investigate the connection between memories activated by these objects as they relate to my current reality. By fusing traditional art materials and techniques with unconventional objects, such as military drab shelters, punching bag leather, and concrete, I make work rooted in R.A.G.E.E. to illustrate depth not only in the visual work, but in the process in which my work is created, adding layers to be peeled away by the audience.
Biography
Philip Gabriel Steverson (b. 2000) is an interdisciplinary artist born and raised in West Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, whose practice examines the psychological weight of memory, inherited trauma, grief, and spiritual endurance through sculpture, textiles, installation, video, and found materials. Growing up amid persistent emotional, physical, and environmental instability cultivated a heightened awareness of anxiety, hypervigilance, and the subconscious ways trauma is stored within the body. These formative experiences continue to shape his relationship to material, leading him to investigate how objects can function as vessels for memory, protection, resilience, and healing.
Working across fiber, concrete, glass, military drab shelters, punching bag leather, and collected artifacts, Steverson transforms everyday materials into emotionally charged environments that explore the intersection of personal history, Christian faith, and the unseen architecture of the mind. His studio practice is grounded in documenting internal thought, social encounters, dreams, journal entries, and found objects, treating these fragments as “time trackers” that collapse past and present into tangible forms. Through his philosophy of R.A.G.E.E.—Resilience, Acceptance, Grief, and Emotional Exploration—developed following the unexpected passing of his mother, Katherine Doraella Steverson, in 2021, his work investigates how material can embody mourning while creating space for reflection, vulnerability, and collective healing.
Steverson earned bachelor’s degrees in Fashion Design and Poetry from Arizona State University, where his exploration of textile manipulation expanded into an interdisciplinary practice centered on materiality and spatial experience. In Fall 2026, he will begin the Master of Fine Arts program in Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a recipient of the New Artist Society Scholarship, where he will continue investigating the transformative potential of material, memory, and faith.