The Missouri Arts Council has named Becky Stevens its latest Missouri Featured Artist, highlighting her piece “Fauna Signs,” a mixed media work that blends encaustic photography, oil paint, and wet felting over reclaimed fence wire.
Stevens works in a style known as asemic writing, an abstract art form that mimics the look of handwriting or text without carrying any literal meaning. The result is a series of expressive marks and symbols that read almost like a private language, open to whatever interpretation the viewer brings to it.
A Personal Visual Language
What sets Stevens apart is how widely she applies this technique across mediums. According to the Arts Council, she creates her squiggle-like symbols “in stitch and felt, in two and three dimensions, in fiber and encaustic works.”
That range allows her to explore the same visual vocabulary through completely different textures and processes, from soft fiber pieces to layered wax and paint.
In “Fauna Signs,” Stevens combines several of these techniques at once. The encaustic photography process involves fusing pigmented wax onto a surface, often over a photographic image, to build up texture and depth.
Layering oil paint and wet felted fiber on top of reclaimed fence wire adds another dimension, turning a discarded material into the literal armature for the artwork. The piece reflects both a physical reworking of found materials and a symbolic layer of invented script, giving it a sense of history and mystery at the same time.
Recognition Through the Featured Artist Program
The Missouri Arts Council’s Featured Artist series regularly spotlights working artists from across the state, giving them a platform to reach new audiences and connect their work to a wider arts community.
Being selected offers artists like Stevens visibility beyond their usual gallery circuits, introducing their work to people who follow the council’s social media and website.
Stevens’ work can be viewed further on her personal website, beckystevens.net, where she shares more examples of her fiber and encaustic pieces. Additional information about the Featured Artist program, including past honorees, is available through the Missouri Arts Council’s website under its featured artists section.
The post announcing her selection has already drawn attention online, with the council’s social media followers getting an early look at “Fauna Signs” before wider distribution.
As interest in fiber arts and mixed media techniques continues to grow, recognitions like this one help bring lesser-known but highly skilled artists into the spotlight, connecting their unconventional creative process with audiences who might not otherwise encounter it.
