THE UNCIVILIZED ARTIST · STEPH GUILLÉN

ANOTHER WAY OF BEING IS
still possible.

Art. Refusal. More-than-human worlds.

@the_uncivilized_artist ↗ Start a conversation ↗

The artwork archive

MATERIALS HOLD
THE EVIDENCE.

Work across mixed media, found objects, painting, and digital experiments. Enter through an image—or follow a material or commitment.

A curated selection
2023–2026

The position

ART AGAINST
DOMINATION.

The Uncivilized Artist is a public identity for a practice of resistance, witnessing, and critical self-inquiry.

Steph Guillén
Olympia, Washington

A living world.
A culture of extraction.
A practice of refusal.

Artist statement

This practice confronts the systems that make domination seem ordinary: capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, hierarchy, extraction, consumption, animal exploitation, and the myth of human exceptionalism.

Art can resist those systems. It can also record what it feels like to live within their unraveling: grief, anger, absurdity, tenderness, and an attachment to the beauty that remains.

The work moves among mixed media, assemblage, painting, found materials, reclaimed paper, and more-than-human encounters. Material histories stay visible. A discarded thing does not become innocent simply because it becomes art.

Alongside the studio is another task: examining how the artist remains entangled in the very systems she challenges. That scholarly and reflexive inquiry has its own space. It does not require every artwork to announce a resolution.

A practice in three commitments

Refusal is
only the beginning.

Resistance. Witnessing.
And the difficult work of
turning the question inward.

Resist domination.

Confront the systems that turn living worlds into resources: capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, extraction, and human exceptionalism.

Follow this thread

Witness the unraveling.

Give form to the grief, anger, strangeness, and beauty of living through modernity’s unraveling. Make a record of what is being lost—and what persists.

Follow this thread

Question my place in it.

Hold a separate space for critical, scholarly self-inquiry: how my own habits, privileges, materials, and desires participate in the systems I resist.

Enter the inquiry

Close detail of the leaf’s textured edge against layered pigments in The Violence of Separation.

What does “uncivilized” mean here?

A refusal of the hierarchy.
A demand for relationship.

“Uncivilized” turns the language of progress back on the systems that claim it. The target is the idea that some lives, peoples, species, and places exist to be ruled, improved, consumed, or erased by others.

It is a critique of domination, never a ranking of cultures or a romantic claim to an untouched past. The question is how to make, live, and relate without taking supremacy as a starting point.

See how the commitments connect ↗

The artist

STEPH
GUILLÉN

Steph Guillén is a multidisciplinary artist and PhD researcher based in Olympia, Washington. Her practice works across mixed media, assemblage, painting, reclaimed materials, and more-than-human encounters.

With graduate training in art therapy and counseling, she brings an attention to lived experience, grief, embodiment, and symbolic form into a public practice increasingly concerned with domination and modernity’s unraveling.

Her current inquiry uses arts-based critical autoethnography, informed by posthuman feminism and terrapsychology, to examine art as resistance and witness alongside a separate critical inquiry into personal complicity.

Enter the research questions ↗

PhD inquiry / In development

HOW DO WE MAKE
WITHIN THE RUINS?

Art as radical resistance and witness to modernity’s unraveling—with the artist’s own entanglement held open to critical examination.

Research in progress
PhD study began in 2026

The art and the self-inquiry
have different work to do.

The studio can confront domination and give form to lived experience. Alongside it, critical autoethnographic inquiry asks how an artist’s own position, habits, and choices remain bound to the systems being resisted.

This is an evolving inquiry, not a completed theory or a prediction of inevitable collapse. Its public questions stay close to material practice, embodied experience, and relationships with more-than-human worlds.

Current methodological orientation

01Arts-based critical autoethnography
02A posthuman feminist lens
03Terrapsychological attention to place
04Lived, embodied experience

Follow the reflexive thread ↗

An existing field practice

What does the place
reveal or conceal?

01 / Encounter02 / Oracle03 / Making04 / Critical reflection

Encounter

What does the place reveal or conceal?

Begin with a place and the beings, materials, sensations, and interruptions encountered there. Attend before naming a meaning. The encounter can remain unresolved.

Oracle

What changes when interpretation is interrupted?

A symbolic prompt opens another possible reading of the encounter. The oracle is a reflective practice, not proof of what a place or another being thinks.

Making

What happens when the material has a say?

Translate the encounter into material experiment. Follow texture, resistance, weathering, accident, and change. Making becomes an opportunity to notice what a predetermined image might exclude.

Critical reflection

What have I brought into this encounter?

Return to the experience with questions about power, projection, consumption, and responsibility. This reflexive work has its own space; it does not need to be visibly illustrated in every artwork.

On the reading shelf

Thinking in company.

Companions to an evolving practice.
These are influences, not endorsements of every claim.

Modernity / Entanglement

Hospicing Modernity

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira

More-than-human worlds

Staying with the Trouble

Donna J. Haraway

Relational accountability

Research Is Ceremony

Shawn Wilson

Patterns / Perspective

Sand Talk

Tyson Yunkaporta

Open questions / Not finished arguments

Stay with the difficult part.

Can a material be an act of refusal?

What does using discarded material interrupt? What remains unchanged? Trace one example through the relationship explorer, then hold the artwork’s reflexive question beside it.

Follow reclaimed material ↗

What does witnessing ask of an artist?

How might a work register grief, anger, or beauty without making a spectacle of damage? What can remain unresolved in the image, and what responsibility belongs in the artist’s account of it?

Enter the witnessing thread ↗

Where does my own complicity enter?

Which choices about materials, access, ownership, travel, and circulation sustain the structures being resisted? This inquiry sits alongside making, leaving room for reflection that is not necessarily illustrated in the finished work.

Turn the question inward ↗

A point of contact

LET’S MAKE
SOMETHING MATTER.

For exhibition conversations, material experiments, collaborations, and difficult questions worth thinking through together.

Artists · Activists
Ecological thinkers

Bring a question.
An invitation.
A possibility.

Tell me what you are working toward, why this practice connects with it, and what you have in mind. An exhibition, a conversation, a shared experiment—start with the part that matters.

Find me on Instagram

@the_uncivilized_artist ↗

Olympia, Washington
Pacific Northwest, United States

Compose an inquiry.

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YOUR NAMEWHAT BRINGS YOU HERE?YOUR MESSAGEOpen Instagram to send

STEPH GUILLÉN · ARTIST & PHD RESEARCHER

THE
UNCIVILIZED
ARTIST.

Art as resistance.
Art as witness.
A refusal to call domination progress.

Enter the work Read the position

A heart-shaped leaf embedded in an earthy painted surface, with visible veins, worn edges, and rust-colored drips. — The Violence of Separation, 2026 ↗Mixed media · Full composition

The world is not a resource.
Neither are we.

For artists, activists,
and ecological thinkers.

Objects. Encounters. Acts of refusal.

Selected work

Explore the archive

Recent work

A practice in three commitments

Refusal is
only the beginning.

Resistance. Witnessing.
And the difficult work of
turning the question inward.

Resist domination.

Confront the systems that turn living worlds into resources: capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, extraction, and human exceptionalism.

Follow this thread

Witness the unraveling.

Give form to the grief, anger, strangeness, and beauty of living through modernity’s unraveling. Make a record of what is being lost—and what persists.

Follow this thread

Question my place in it.

Hold a separate space for critical, scholarly self-inquiry: how my own habits, privileges, materials, and desires participate in the systems I resist.

Enter the inquiry

An interactive way into the practice

Nothing exists
in isolation.

Follow the connections between a material, an artwork, and the commitments that shape this practice.

Start with a question. Trace a thread. See where resistance becomes witness—and where the artist has to turn the question inward.

Explore the connections

01 / A COMMITMENTResist domination

02 / A MATERIALBotanical material

03 / AN ARTWORKThe Violence of Separation

TRACE A CONNECTION ↗

In the studio. In the questions.

Ongoing investigations

Anthropocene Reliquaries

Seventeen vessels. Discarded containers and reclaimed materials become offerings from the Age of Waste.

The Uncivilized Archive

An ongoing direction for witnessing modernity’s unraveling through material encounters, making, and critical self-inquiry.

View full image ⤢

Full composition / selected detail · © Steph Guillén

Detail: upper leaf and rust-colored marks

Full composition / selected detail · © Steph Guillén

Full composition / selected detail · © Steph Guillén

Full composition / selected detail · © Steph Guillén

Full composition and selected details. © Steph Guillén.

2026 / Mixed media

The Violence of Separation

A heart-shaped leaf holds the image together while its veins, worn edges, and surrounding drips trouble the boundary between body and landscape. Separation becomes a wound rather than a neutral fact.

Materials: Botanical material · Pigment
Context: A recent work in the evolving practice of The Uncivilized Artist.

Current connections / Resistance + Witnessing

The leaf is a body with its own history. Read through the current practice, this work troubles the idea that humans stand outside the living world—and that the world exists to serve us.

Trace this work’s connections

A separate scholarly thread / 03

The question turns inward.

The artwork and the artist’s critical self-inquiry are related, but they are not the same thing. A question to hold alongside this work:

How does making an artwork from a living being’s remains change my responsibilities to that being?

About the inquiry

Ongoing series / 2026

ANTHROPOCENE
RELIQUARIES

Offerings from the Age of Waste.

17 vessels
Reclaimed material

An archive of what gets thrown away.17Vessels.
Remnants.
Evidence.Series overview · No vessel photographs in this selection

What becomes sacred
in an age of disposability?

The series transforms discarded containers, recycled paper pulp, and found remnants into speculative artifacts. What a culture throws away becomes a record of what it values.

The vessels sit between offering and warning. Their surfaces carry traces of previous use, inviting attention to extraction, excess, ecological memory, and the material remains of consumption.

Materials: Recycled paper pulp · Discarded containers · Found remnants
Commitments: Resistance to disposability · Witnessing material histories

A separate reflexive question

Does transforming waste interrupt consumption, or can it make consumption feel easier to forgive?

Trace the series’ connections ↗

A brown chicken looks upward toward a luminous black hole in a colorful cosmic digital collage.

View full image ⤢

Full composition / selected detail · © Steph Guillén

Full composition. © Steph Guillén.

2026 / Digital collage

Cosmic chicken — digital study

An ordinary backyard being takes up a place in the cosmos. Humor unsettles the habit of treating nonhuman lives as background to the human story.

Materials: Digital image
Context: A recent digital study. This is a descriptive catalogue label, rather than a confirmed artwork title.

Current connections / Resistance

The shift in scale places a familiar bird inside a much larger world. The current curatorial connection is to a refusal of human exceptionalism, carried through humor rather than a declaration.

Trace this work’s connections

A separate scholarly thread / 03

The question turns inward.

The artwork and the artist’s critical self-inquiry are related, but they are not the same thing. A question to hold alongside this work:

Am I allowing this being to exceed my story, or simply assigning her a role in it?

About the inquiry

View full image ⤢

Full composition / selected detail · © Steph Guillén

Full composition. © Steph Guillén.

2024 / Mixed media

Stop Fossil Fuel Industry Disinformation

A direct visual refusal of fossil fuel disinformation. An industrial skyline becomes the setting for an unmistakable demand.

Materials: Pigment · Paper
Context: An earlier mixed-media work, inspired by reporting in The Guardian in April 2024. The image’s wording is used as the display title here.

Current connections / Resistance + Witnessing

Here resistance is explicit: the image names an industry and the narratives that protect it. It offers an earlier point of contact with the practice’s present confrontational direction.

Trace this work’s connections

Original artwork context +

See the Context and Materials notes above for this artwork’s original setting. Its current commitment connections are curatorial readings alongside that history.

A separate scholarly thread / 03

The question turns inward.

The artwork and the artist’s critical self-inquiry are related, but they are not the same thing. A question to hold alongside this work:

What fossil-fuel dependencies remain inside the everyday production and circulation of my own art?

About the inquiry

A small found branch transformed into a handheld art object with a black feather-like form, small stones, and symbolic details.

View full image ⤢

Full composition / selected detail · © Steph Guillén

Full composition. © Steph Guillén.

2024 / Found-object assemblage

Keeper of Keys

A small branch found while hiking became a personal art object. Its irregular form carries the encounter with the found material into the finished work.

Materials: Found material
Context: The original site describes this as an art power object made from a found branch.

Current connections / Resistance

A found branch proposes a different starting point from a standardized art supply. Through the current practice, it opens a question about material choice, attention, and the refusal of endless newness.

Trace this work’s connections

Original artwork context +

See the Context and Materials notes above for this artwork’s original setting. Its current commitment connections are curatorial readings alongside that history.

A separate scholarly thread / 03

The question turns inward.

The artwork and the artist’s critical self-inquiry are related, but they are not the same thing. A question to hold alongside this work:

How do I distinguish a respectful encounter with found material from another act of taking?

About the inquiry

Two small figures face a large dark presence above them in an expressive soft-pastel drawing.

View full image ⤢

Full composition / selected detail · © Steph Guillén

Full composition. © Steph Guillén.

2024 / Soft pastel

Spirit of the Land

An earlier soft-pastel work records an imagined encounter with the spirit of the land beneath a Houston home, attending to pollution, conflict, and the possibility of returning life.

Materials: Pigment · Paper
Context: The original artwork account describes a personal spiritual journey. It is presented as the artist’s experience, rather than a factual account of the land’s history.

Current connections / Witnessing

A place is encountered as more than scenery. The connection to witnessing lies in attending to a landscape’s disturbance and to the artist’s felt responsibility within it.

Trace this work’s connections

Original artwork context +

See the Context and Materials notes above for this artwork’s original setting. Its current commitment connections are curatorial readings alongside that history.

A separate scholarly thread / 03

The question turns inward.

The artwork and the artist’s critical self-inquiry are related, but they are not the same thing. A question to hold alongside this work:

What might my interpretation of a place conceal, and whose histories do I still need to hear?

About the inquiry

An abstract mixed-media composition of flower- and cell-like shapes in pink, green, yellow, and dark gray.

View full image ⤢

Full composition / selected detail · © Steph Guillén

Full composition. © Steph Guillén.

2024 / Mixed media

Beautiful Mystery

Forms hover between flower and cell. An earlier mixed-media work gives visual space to awe, ambiguity, and the difficulty of holding a living thing inside a single category.

Materials: Pigment · Paper
Context: The original artwork note identifies both a flower and a cell in the image.

Current connections / Witnessing

The work offers an earlier visual language for encountering life without resolving it into a fixed explanation. Its connection to the present practice is an invitation to look beyond mastery.

Trace this work’s connections

Original artwork context +

See the Context and Materials notes above for this artwork’s original setting. Its current commitment connections are curatorial readings alongside that history.

A separate scholarly thread / 03

The question turns inward.

The artwork and the artist’s critical self-inquiry are related, but they are not the same thing. A question to hold alongside this work:

Can I make space for ambiguity without using mystery to avoid material or political responsibility?

About the inquiry

A soft-pastel drawing of a stag with branching antlers and another deer in a walled garden beneath a flowing colorful sky.

View full image ⤢

Full composition / selected detail · © Steph Guillén

Full composition. © Steph Guillén.

2024 / Soft pastel

Spirit Stag

A soft-pastel work arising from a dream of a stag in an enclosed garden: a being encountered with concern, uncertainty, and an impulse to help.

Materials: Pigment · Paper
Context: The original artwork account describes a dream, rather than an observed wildlife encounter.

Current connections / Witnessing

The meeting holds both attention and uncertainty. Within the present practice, it opens a way to consider care without assuming that another being’s life is fully knowable to us.

Trace this work’s connections

Original artwork context +

See the Context and Materials notes above for this artwork’s original setting. Its current commitment connections are curatorial readings alongside that history.

A separate scholarly thread / 03

The question turns inward.

The artwork and the artist’s critical self-inquiry are related, but they are not the same thing. A question to hold alongside this work:

How can care avoid becoming another form of control over another being?

About the inquiry

A luminous, impressionistic forest in pink, yellow, green, and blue, presented in its complete horizontal composition.

View full image ⤢

Full composition / selected detail · © Steph Guillén

Full composition. © Steph Guillén.

2023 / Painting

Firefly Forest

A luminous forest holds flashes of color and unstable edges. A place appears as atmosphere and encounter rather than a set of isolated objects.

Materials: Pigment
Context: An earlier painting. Its connection to witnessing is a current curatorial reading, not a claim about its original intent.

Current connections / Witnessing

Witnessing can attend to beauty as well as damage. This earlier work makes room for the felt presence of a living world before that presence is translated into utility.

Trace this work’s connections

Original artwork context ↗

A separate scholarly thread / 03

The question turns inward.

The artwork and the artist’s critical self-inquiry are related, but they are not the same thing. A question to hold alongside this work:

When does depicting a place help me attend to it, and when does it turn that place into something I possess?

About the inquiry

The relationship explorer

FOLLOW
THE THREAD.

A material is never just a material. Explore the connections among artworks, material choices, and the three commitments of this practice.

Choose a commitment.
Follow a material.
Open a work.

Connections are curatorial invitations, not fixed meanings. The third commitment opens a separate reflexive question for each work.

Connection mapList view

01 / Choose a commitment

01 / COMMITMENTResistance 02 / COMMITMENTWitnessing 03 / COMMITMENTReflexive inquiry

02 / Follow a material

All materialsBotanical materialDigital imageDiscarded containersFound materialPaperPigmentReclaimed paper

03 / Connected entries

The Violence of SeparationMixed media / 2026Anthropocene ReliquariesOngoing series / 2026

Cosmic chicken — digital studyDigital collage / 2026

Stop Fossil Fuel Industry DisinformationMixed media / 2024

Keeper of KeysFound-object assemblage / 2024

01 / Resistance → Botanical material + Pigment

The Violence of Separation

The leaf is a body with its own history. Read through the current practice, this work troubles the idea that humans stand outside the living world—and that the world exists to serve us.

Open the artwork

A separate reflexive question

How does making an artwork from a living being’s remains change my responsibilities to that being?

ANOTHER WAY OF BEING ISstill possible.

MATERIALS HOLDTHE EVIDENCE.

The Violence of Separation

Anthropocene Reliquaries

Cosmic chicken — digital study

Stop Fossil Fuel Industry Disinformation

Keeper of Keys

Spirit of the Land

Beautiful Mystery

Spirit Stag

Firefly Forest

ART AGAINSTDOMINATION.

A living world.A culture of extraction.A practice of refusal.

Refusal isonly the beginning.

Resist domination.

Witness the unraveling.

Question my place in it.

A refusal of the hierarchy.A demand for relationship.

STEPHGUILLÉN

HOW DO WE MAKEWITHIN THE RUINS?

The art and the self-inquiryhave different work to do.

What does the placereveal or conceal?

Encounter

Oracle

Making

Critical reflection

Thinking in company.

Hospicing Modernity

Staying with the Trouble

Research Is Ceremony

Sand Talk

Stay with the difficult part.

LET’S MAKESOMETHING MATTER.

Bring a question.An invitation.A possibility.

Compose an inquiry.

THEUNCIVILIZEDARTIST.

Selected work

The Violence of Separation

Anthropocene Reliquaries

Stop Fossil Fuel Industry Disinformation

Refusal isonly the beginning.

Resist domination.

Witness the unraveling.

Question my place in it.

Nothing existsin isolation.

Ongoing investigations

Anthropocene Reliquaries

The Uncivilized Archive

The Violence of Separation

The question turns inward.

Another material. Another way in.

Stop Fossil Fuel Industry Disinformation

Spirit of the Land

Beautiful Mystery

ANTHROPOCENERELIQUARIES

What becomes sacredin an age of disposability?

Another material. Another way in.

Keeper of Keys

The Violence of Separation

Cosmic chicken — digital study

Cosmic chicken — digital study

The question turns inward.

Another material. Another way in.

The Violence of Separation

Anthropocene Reliquaries

Stop Fossil Fuel Industry Disinformation

Stop Fossil Fuel Industry Disinformation

The question turns inward.

Another material. Another way in.

The Violence of Separation

Spirit of the Land

Beautiful Mystery

Keeper of Keys

The question turns inward.

Another material. Another way in.

Anthropocene Reliquaries

The Violence of Separation

Cosmic chicken — digital study

Spirit of the Land

The question turns inward.

ANOTHER WAY OF BEING IS
still possible.

MATERIALS HOLD
THE EVIDENCE.

ART AGAINST
DOMINATION.

A living world.
A culture of extraction.
A practice of refusal.

Refusal is
only the beginning.

A refusal of the hierarchy.
A demand for relationship.

STEPH
GUILLÉN

HOW DO WE MAKE
WITHIN THE RUINS?

The art and the self-inquiry
have different work to do.

What does the place
reveal or conceal?

LET’S MAKE
SOMETHING MATTER.

Bring a question.
An invitation.
A possibility.

THE
UNCIVILIZED
ARTIST.

Refusal is
only the beginning.

Nothing exists
in isolation.

ANTHROPOCENE
RELIQUARIES

What becomes sacred
in an age of disposability?

FOLLOW
THE THREAD.

FOLLOW
THE THREAD.

FOLLOW
THE THREAD.

FOLLOW
THE THREAD.