Stephen Fox was born in Oxford in 1954. He received no formal art training. After a succession of varied employments including psychiatric nurse, car mechanic, and roughneck on a North Sea oil rig, in 1981 he became a self-employed carpenter and builder. He began to make sculpture, in wood at first, in 1985. In 1990, he moved to France, and set up his studio in Lower Normandy, since when he has concentrated on working with stone and marble.
Though he still enjoys making figurative sculpture, he moved towards abstraction in the mid-Nineties, becoming interested in the combination of two or more pieces of stone to form compact entities. Early examples are 'Family 2', and 'Embrace', using Caen limestone. More recently the 'Occupying Spirit' series develops this in marble and harder limestones, involving powerful contrasts of colour and texture.