Stewart's career rests on a particular sustained intuition , that the formal language of abstract sculpture could carry references to ancient myth, to mathematical and astronomical structure, and to the natural forces of the physical world simultaneously, and that those references could be embodied in monumental bronze without losing their original metaphysical charge.
Stewart's path into sculpture led away from the world she had been born into. The Birmingham socialite family she came from offered a clearly defined social trajectory that she rejected as soon as she could leave home, and her decision to pursue art at Montevallo placed her on a different course from the start. The graduate work at Cranbrook , one of the most rigorous craft-and-design teaching environments in the postwar United States , gave her the technical foundation for the sculptural practice she would build over the following half-century, with hands-on training in bronze casting, welding, and woodcarving that few of her contemporaries had.
The move to Houston was the decisive professional turn of her early career. The city's postwar oil-money cultural growth gave her the rare opportunity for monumental public commissions and the institutional support to develop a sculptural practice at scale; Atropos Key, named for one of the Greek Fates and installed in Hermann Park, gave her a permanent civic presence that few abstract sculptors of her generation, and very few women among them, managed to secure.
Her sculptural language drew, throughout her career, on an unusually wide range of intellectual sources. Stewart wrote about her interest in natural forces and in the embodiment of "pent-up contained energy" through references to sacred geometry, astronomy, myth, and physics, and the dynamic ascending lines and rough planes of her abstract bronzes register that combination of references. Her figurative work, where it appears, takes its subjects from a long iconography of female mythical and historical figures: Egyptian queens, Greek and pre-classical goddesses, the female heroes of various ancient and medieval traditions.
Her exhibition record across more than forty American venues placed her sculpture in front of national audiences during the 1970s and 1980s, and the documented archive of her work, the Hannah Holliday Stewart Sculpture Records, now held at Rice University's Woodson Research Center, runs from 1950 to 2006 and constitutes the principal scholarly resource for her career.
The 1990 move to Albuquerque marked a deliberate withdrawal from the public art world. The two decades she spent in New Mexico were largely private, with continued bronze production in studio seclusion rather than through gallery or institutional channels, and the body of late work she produced there has continued to be reassessed in the years since her death.