Stone & DeGuire 2025 winners announced

Viola Bordon explores the interplay between human and environmental forces through fiber and ceramic art. Her fiber practice investigates the invisible forces that shape land and material — such as pressure, movement, and time. She creates large-scale, soft sculptures that shift and transform, embodying resistance to rigidity. Bordon works with ephemeral installations that explore interconnections within the landscape. Her process begins with close observation of natural phenomena — salt precipitation, water surfaces, rock cycles, and wind. Fabric acts as a conduit, absorbing displacements, stains, and residues that mark the land’s shifts and capture its stories. These sculptures respond to conditions like wind, humidity, and time, transforming with the landscape.

With this award, Bordon’s work will shift from observation to creation, using the carbon from burning wildfires in the American West to pigment ceramics. Her collaborators include the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, which is invested in the visualization of how fire, destruction, and renewal can occur. She will also build on previous Fulbright-funded research in India on weaving with the invasive water hyacinth and broader textile traditions in South Asia.

Vanessa Gravenor works in the mediums of moving image, photography, and installation, which are motivated by intensive research into audiovisual archives that document war and conflict. Through moving image, she unfolds how images such as propaganda or learning materials can code realities — but also how these same images can transform into counter-images, which challenge the rule of the norm. In past artistic research works, Gravenor has explored former military Cold War sites in Latvia and Canada, which are presently transformed into museums or have fallen into ruination. She lets her camera rest on these landscapes, exploring the tension between geographies and their enduring secrecy.

Gravenor’s work funded by the Stone & DeGuire award will include an expansion of her filmic project, “Free Recall,” into a comprehensive installation with photographic prints, a mixed collage wall vinyl, and sculptural elements and found objects from shooting locations. In another project, she plans to create a video installation to explore the role of gender and presence of post-traumatic stress disorder though seven women photographers who worked for the Soviet Union during World War II.

Rachel Youn’s work explores the false promises of cheaply made products that claim to fulfill desires for convenience, self-improvement, and companionship. By anthropomorphizing machines designed to simulate human-like acts of care and service, they investigate the ways human-machine interactions parallel parasocial relationships with laboring bodies. Youn sources objects like baby swings, massagers, and exercise machines through secondhand shopping, disassembling them to examine how materials come together to create motion that is both seductive and unsettling. They then reconfigure the components into anthropomorphized sculptures that move erotically and erratically until their eventual self-destruction.

The award will support Youn’s research in South Korea and Italy, along with a residency at the Bemis Center in Nebraska. They plan to develop a larger installation expanding on their previous work, “CLEANSE (I’ll do it myself),” inspired by the car wash tunnel. It will also support the realization of a major presentation at Counterpublic in St. Louis in 2026.

Nancy Stone, BFA ’70, and Lawrence DeGuire, BFA ’70, met as undergraduate students at WashU. The husband-and-wife duo, who were married at Graham Chapel on campus, began their artistic collaboration in 1972. They enjoyed a long career as Stone & DeGuire, exhibiting widely along the West Coast. The annual awards honor that legacy while allowing recent and mid-career alumni to continue pushing forward their unique artistic practices. Learn more about the awardees and past recipients here.