Denyse Stawicki

I am a maker, printmaker, and mixed-media artist interested in what happens when images, objects, and memories are taken apart and rebuilt.

My practice is rooted in collecting. I gather photographs, paper, fragments, found materials and stories, allowing them to accumulate and find new relationships with one another. I am particularly drawn to thinks that have already lived a life. An old photograph is never simply an image; it carries evidence of a person, a place, a moment, and everything that came before and after it.

Much of my work begins with photographs from my great-grandmother’s albums and memories of the time I spent at her has house as a young child. These personal archives become material to be altered, layered, obscured, printed, cut, and reconstructed. Through this process, I am less interested in preserving a memory than in exploring how memory changes–how it fragments, how we fill in what is missing, and how ordinary objects can become vessels for the past.

At its core, my work is an act of gathering and making. I take fragments of the personal and the familiar and give them another life–building objects and images that exist somewhere between memory and invention.

Before becoming a full–time artist, I worked as a project manager in the high-tech industry. I left that career to raise my son, eventually returning to school to study graphic design and printmaking. I received my BFA in Graphic Design from Portland State University in 2022 and my MFA in Print Media from Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2024.