STATEMENT OF WORK

"...they rivet our attention, with an awareness of vastness and detail that is uncanny. We return to the paintings to look again and again, prompted by the sensation of movement in our consciousness of space."
— Linda Leslie Brown, essay accompanying Mary Bucci McCoy: Vis-à-vis, Gray Contemporary, Houston, TX (2019)

PANEL PAINTINGS
I consider our current human situation and identity in relationship with the mineral, vegetal, and animal through non-objective, intimately-scaled alla prima panel paintings offered as poetic spaces of self-reflexive focus. Scaled in reference to the human head, my paintings invite the intimacy of encounter one might experience with a mirror or portrait. Operating simultaneously as “painting-as-mirror”, “painting-as-window” and “painting-as-object”, each work offers multiple negotiations between presence and absence. The refraction of light by the iridescent pigments means that there is no one definitive reading of a painting. Each painting is in a sense open-ended: the viewer creates their own unique, irreproducible experience of a painting as the shifting effects of light and position relative to the work activate the painting and lead to a continuum of change in its appearance.My long-term practices of subtle external and internal attunement — walking my local post-glacial, post-colonial New England landscape through the seasons and personal somatic exploration on micro andmacro levels via a variety of modalities — converge to yield an improvisational, materially-resonant painting vocabulary of fluidity, sedimentation, gravity, time, breath, movement and indexical color.

While the panel paintings each happen in one intinsively focused painting session, work in the Transmission series is developed over time through water-based processes of erosion and sedimentation, an accretion of multiple thin layers and washes on a substrate of silicon carbide.