Anne McGrath’s “Modern Ancestors,” is a series of pieces constructed from mixed materials. See more of Anne’s work on Instagram @TheAnneMcGrath.
“Modern Ancestors” by Anne McGrath
Category: Visual Art
Heirloom
Catherine-Esther Cowie, Heirloom, Mixed Media Collage
Catherine-Esther Cowie, Auntie G. My Dahomey. My Amazon., Mixed Media Collage
Catherine-Esther Cowie, Hello Again, Blès, Mixed Media Collage
Catherine-Esther Cowie, The Queen of All the Dirt, Mixed Media Collage
I work in collage for its accessibility, for its infinite possibilities beyond working solely in paper but incorporating ink, watercolor, textiles and 3D elements. This series features cut-outs from fashion magazines, images of orchids and magenta India ink. I seek to map the emotional landscapes of my subject matter, women, immigrant women, Caribbean women and the complexity of emotions/states that simultaneously exist: shame and pleasure, loss and strength, beauty and ugliness.
The portraits in this series began as a form of play: I wanted to see how paper and ink could work together. They represent fears, griefs, memories, self-perceptions etc. The piece titled, “Hello Again, Blès” explores how I experience trauma. A sneaky buried wound…then a trigger…through a body now. “Blès” means internal wound in St. Lucian Kwéyòl.
Naming this collection “Heirloom” gestures to a writing project that I am working on that explores what we pass on or give to another generation: ruin and/or redemption. What was carried in the bodies of my mothers: their fears, trauma, loves, afflictions, histories. How some of it is transmitted through story, through their bodies— their way of moving and being in the world. These portraits explore what I carry around in my body…what I may or may not pass on…
Danger Iceberg
These are pages from a book I have been working on from 2003 to the present. This work has slowly revealed itself to be about water, rising water, and human impact on the planet and is part of a larger project called The Sea Museum. The found book that I am altering to make these photomontages was about destroying icebergs, the problem of icebergs, and appears to have been made for children’s education (Danger! Icebergs Ahead! by Lynn Poole and Gray Johnson Poole, Random House, 1961). I’ve always been interested in the absurd, and was feeling a homage to Hanna Hoch, the great Dada artist. I began adding water and related images. I wasn’t working consciously in the beginning, just covering the pages with water. The subject matter feels prescient now, fifteen years in, and I am still altering the book. Like the oceans, this project continues to exist and change.
Under the Shade of a Paradise
My artworks and projects focus on ecological subjects, expanding the uses of technologies and capturing environments that escape our sight. These images are samples of two bodies of works. One of titled Paradis, 2018-2019, and the most recent one Dusk/Daybreak, 2020. The images depicted in Paradis make us—the viewers—reconsider ideas of “paradise” with the use of images derived from tropical vegetation that intersect and overlap. Each print is carefully crafted through an experimental digital printing process. In Dusk/Daybreak, there’s an exploration of the landscape through a nontraditional photographic medium. Each print is made through a layering digital printing process. The images make account for the daylight transitions that allow for the visible and the invisible, uncovering mysteries along the Caribbean coast.
I create large-scale audio and visual installations, experimental digital prints, sound arrangements in space, and videos to recreate spaces, memories, and experiences using imagery of natural spaces as a metaphor to understand the complex and interconnected realities we all live. The sources that generate the artworks are mostly research-based in a digital form or archival material that serve to create the installations themselves. Images of obscure natural spaces and elements that define our intimate relationship to spaces—storage containers, sounds, voices, and songs of proclamations in the void—become the aesthetics of the work. Through my artworks and practice I am constantly confronting geopolitical issues, ecology, technology, the act of speculation about the relations that we create to spaces and natural environments. I am always underlining a conceptual framework that comes from my experiences as a Caribbean colonial and post-colonial being as it is in dialogue with the rest of the world.
from the Bird Journal Series
27 Years, 42 Years, Backbone, and Stitched belong to the Bird Journal Series, a body of work exploring movement and migration due to climate change. As the human impact on the planet increases and pushes the world toward ecological disaster, both animals and people begin to move around the globe in new ways. Birds’ migratory patterns, and even their bodies, are changing in reaction to rising global temperatures.
It is important to me that each drawing, sculpture, or process work be able to stand alone, yet it is in unifying them as one installation that they become stronger still. Similarly, we as humans can and must work together, acknowledging our interconnectedness with each other and with nonhuman beings, to protect the future of the planet.
Foliate Light
My endeavor is to pursue a photographic image that embodies natural and immediate expression. My aim is not to produce the sensational or the intellectually novel, but to validate a point of encounter, a tenuous fragment or impression.
The beginning is often a highly chaotic and kinesthetic activity in the process of discovery. I acknowledge a kind of readiness for images more so than the existence of a muse or the notion of inspiration. This readiness requires looking intently at my surroundings; a humility of purpose and acceptance; and a quiet, though often exasperating patience. I do not seek a particular image but rather encourage the image to arrive at my threshold. I allow the light, shadow, color and composition to form organically, in a place somewhere between a vibrant reality and the recesses of my unconscious. I relish this elusive aspect of emergence and honor this transient beginning.
Each photograph evolves in its own unique manner. There is no delineated, predictable order or destination; there are few preconceptions. The initial inception is expanded, combined with newly discovered associations, and gradually finds a voice of intent. Even though I encourage states of intuition, ambiguity, and randomness, I must acknowledge that defining formal or aesthetic decision-making occurs; my creative process is not purely automatic. Formal devices are employed to clarify and strengthen that emotion which first compelled me to photograph. However, any analytic construction is subordinate to the original gestural responsiveness.
In the final image, when the photograph is delivered to the viewer, it is transformed into a new, autonomous existence. And, at its best, the image retains the freshness and spontaneity of the original vision.
Relationships
My work is contemporary and figurative. Through image-making, I explore what it means to be a human being and to be part of the universal human experience, touching on relationships between people, with nature, and with the environment around us. I see myself and others in a constant cycle, always fracturing, fragmenting, and reassembling ourselves over time. All my work—both art and writing—falls somewhere on this experiential spectrum.
When I begin to paint, I imagine myself walking on a beam of light. I work completely intuitively and without reference to anything around me. I look at the blank canvas and simply begin to draw what I “see.” After sketching the image in pencil, I patch in color. I choose acrylic paint because it dries quickly so that I can paint out and paint over, working in a collage-like fashion. I can also use acrylics to create a stained-glass effect by hand-rubbing areas with very, very thin layers of color.
I know I am on the right track when I feel the presence of some energy, then come into relationship with the canvas as it begins to communicate itself to me. As I transform the original vision, the final piece emerges. I never begin a painting with an idea. The ideas come later.
These 9” by 12” paintings, part of a larger series titled Relationships, are the result of a special challenge I set for myself in 2019. I’d been working on much larger canvases, and I wanted to make smaller, more intimate, almost miniature works. I hoped to prove that a small painting could have as great an impact as a large one.
Dispersion Series
This digital painting series, “Dispersion,” focuses on the influence of shape on both boundary and color. In all my works I have a “central shape”—an abstract form more or less centered in the composition. I always leave it to the viewer to determine how these shapes read; I don’t dictate meaning. In “Dispersion,” these central shapes are either transparent or teeter on transparency, which infuses them with the surrounding color. This surrounding color extends to the edges. The viewer is therefore invited to participate in a two-part experience; they’re simultaneously introduced to the central shape and the surrounding color, and through that pairing, “disperse” themselves—perceptually, spiritually, intellectually—out to the edges of the image (and maybe beyond them, into infinity). Whether that happens or whether everything stops abruptly depends on the viewer’s initial response to the central shape. In 2001: A Space Odyssey there’s a monolith that emits an ear-piercing tone. These pictures should suggest something similar. Whether they are considered infinite or finite, and despite their four edges and the very specific character of their colors, the viewer should be able to hear them in the mind in a private, interpretive spiritual harmony that Kandinsky called “audible to the soul.”
Interior
In this series Mary Tautin Moloney’s poems are inspired by and paired with photographs taken in the subway stations of New York by photographer John Moloney. The work captures the desire to connect alongside the alienation that can come with being alive; how these forces bear on one another and affect us. Mary Tautin Moloney is inspired by what she hears and observes in everyday life: the character of a place; linguistic quirks; her children and motherhood. Her collaborator, photographer John Moloney, is drawn to taking the familiar and making it unfamiliar. In both rural and urban landscapes, he plays with scale, light, and texture to create moments of seeing something for the first time. As one poem leads to the next, a journey emerges through an entirely new landscape, one of the emotional life lived. A touchstone for this project, and Tautin Moloney’s writing in general, is to “cleave to the legendary,” advice once given by Stanley Kunitz to Mark Doty. With this series, photography becomes the entry point for speaking to our larger, shared emotional existence.
Future Holdings
Future Holdings documents the abandoned construction site for what would have been the tallest building in the world (Sky City) in Changsha, China. After a few short weeks of building activity in 2015, government authorities halted all construction and local residents eventually allowed the foundation to fill with water and become a fishing pond. Located on the northern edge of Changsha, Sky City would have been the first structure visitors would come across as they traveled along the Xiangjiang River. Today, though, the only elements that tower over this habitat are the construction cranes that fill the horizon. I first photographed this site in 2016 and have returned each year since. Each time, I was struck by the calm and quietness that enveloped this landscape despite the fact that with more than 7 million residents, Changsha would rank as the second largest city in the United States. My goal with Future Holdings is to investigate political, economic, social, and cultural aspects of our contemporary lives through issues of hubris, the relationship between humans and nature, and the evolution of cities like Changsha.
Green Matter / Gray Space
Green Matter / Gray Space is a play on words from the terms “green space” (an area of grass, trees, or other vegetation set apart for recreational or aesthetic purposes in an otherwise urban environment) and “gray matter” (the darker tissue of the brain and spinal cord, consisting mainly of nerve cell bodies and branching dendrites). The increasing population growth in cities calls into question (or enters into a gray area) the future of green space. When every area of a city is constructed for housing and other buildings, the area of green space per capita shrinks. If the vegetation that has, over time, been ripped out to make space for more human activity can be thought of as the gray matter of the ecosystem, what is it that we are doing to the intelligence of our planet’s environment? With climate change, our insatiable waste, and minimization of plant life, how will our health as city dwellers be impacted by the diminishing environment we rely upon for water, air, and food?
Broken Models
Rachel Poliquin, in her 2012 book The Breathless Zoo, writes that “Taxidermy is deeply marked by human longing,” revealing our hopes and dreams about our place in the natural world. Natural history dioramas present a carefully constructed, perfectly encapsulated and controlled experience of nature, revealing as much about humanity as the nature depicted. In Broken Models, Steensma Hoag negotiates access to dioramas in various stages of being decommissioned and uses these fictional spaces to create imaginary scenes. By introducing a worker wearing a white Hazmat suit, which evokes images of advanced technology labs in which the environment needs to be protected from the worker, the series suggests a scientific method of understanding and quantifying our experience of nature and comments on our failed construction of the environment as an inexhaustible resource.
Remnants
This series features small, improvisational, origami-like collage forms created from manipulated pieces of encaustic-infused rice and tissue papers. The series began with the otherwise practical intention of reusing scrap materials but has evolved into something more meaningful and representative of an interest in science, nature, memory, and narratives of ecosystems in flux. These abstract compositions are the result of an exploration of how encaustic-infused paper can be manipulated through layering, cutting, folding and the use of heated tools. My goal is for these non-representational compositions to reflect a suspended state of evolution as one form shifts to become another.
The Secret War on Laos: UXO
This body of work is inspired by the non-profit organization, Legacies of War, and their mission: “To raise awareness about the history of the Vietnam War-era bombing in Laos and advocate for the clearance of unexploded bombs.” As a refugee/immigrant, the process of connecting and disconnecting with a place or community are abstracted ideas of migration. Similarly, the collage and painting process is unpredictable and is an ongoing dialogue about assimilating and relocating into another culture and space.
Evolution of a Production Landscape
The Production Landscape series profiles the path of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in North Dakota, one of the four states it crosses. For people like me who grew up in suburbia, massive infrastructure projects such as the Dakota Access Pipeline are abstractions. I benefit from the resources they transport, but the costs of such delivery systems are born by others in far away “fly over” places. Beginning in Fall 2016 I followed the pipeline route in North Dakota and photographed the landscapes it traversed. I wanted to see what construction looked like from the ground and view the range and agricultural landscapes reshaped by its insertion. The project does not attempt a comprehensive documentation of the pipeline route or the Bakken-producing region from which the oil is generated, but rather seeks to add context to an important public discussion about natural resource usage. The images highlight the physical disruption of the land’s surface and show the rural areas impacted by its construction. In doing so, the series explores the ways in which landscape photography contextualized current debates related to land-use and natural resource extraction.
Suburban Primitive
New Destination
This project investigates the unseen communication that occurs between the natural and built environments. Using mixed media, Nan Xu transforms nature into a magical-realist world that combines rocks and clouds with feelings and emotions to capture the space between the seen and unseen worlds. In these mystical landscapes, Nan Xu describes texture, space, and light to convey both rational and romantic feelings about the fate of the environment and humanity.
The Poverty of Stimulus
Emblems of dissent
Rousing new forms of resistance
Rejecting submission to mainstream belief
Referencing societal agreements
Revising the paradigm
Cultural Alarm
Considering the nature & context of truth
Constructing an argument for involvement
Questioning motivations & intentions
Commenting on the state of affairs
Dynamic Humility
Scouting language for this moment
Solemnizing diversity
Searching for equilibrium
Selecting the idiosyncratic
Salivating over the funky
Surface Stress – Structure Strain: The Psychology of Architecture in Baltimore and Nagasaki
These paintings, which attempt to describe the complexity of structures, serve as psychological portraits of the people of Baltimore, Maryland, and Nagasaki, Japan. Boarded up doors and windows trap the dark secrets of these poor dwellings. Degraded humans and distraught ghosts wander through these dark places. Inferences to the human psyche are enmeshed in each gash, hole, and sloppy patch.
Redemption
This series of photographs examines the abandoned prison cells of Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Penitentiary subscribed to a theory of rehabilitation that proscribed confinement and a lack of interaction with other inmates. This ran counter to the prevailing system in the United States at the time where harsh physical punishment was the norm. Ideas of church and religious experience are embodied in the building and served as a guide for how prisoners should be rehabilitated: hallways looked like that of a church; low doorways required one to bow and seek penance from a greater power; and a single small skylight, acting as the “eye of God” lit each cell.
Visual Haiku
The photographs in these “visual poems” were taken with a Holga toy camera in the Far East; they represent research undertaken into Chinese and Japanese aesthetic principles and traditions of representation. The elements and principles of art have been used to translate the characteristics of Japanese short poetry – such as economy and the linking of dissimilar things – into the syntax of visual language. As wordless artworks, however. the poems consist entirely of the associations and allusions suggested by the images; the viewer / reader decides the meanings as the poems are open-ended and meditative, having floated free of words.
Composite
My passion for music, archaeology, and branding often shows up in my artwork. Much of my work features remnants of pop culture, with themes infused of spiritual, chronological, and ontological motifs. My work is created with a variety of media — typically ink, watercolor, and acrylic — as well as digital tools like Illustrator and Photoshop. Tinkering with a synthesis of hand-drawn sketches and digital manipulation, I continue to explore the rewarding, often meandering, paths to visual narrative.
Meditation on the Purpose of Art Making
In my works, I attempt to capture some of the narratives that I heard from first-hand accounts while volunteering on Lesvos Island in Greece in December of 2016. What I’ve discovered thus far, is that the refugees are from all around the world, rather than only being from Syria as depicted in the media. I have also come to discover that the news coverage on the topic is often sensationalized, and even sometimes re-enacted for the sake of reporting. The stories of the local villagers and the volunteers seem often forgotten or ignored, and the refugees are used in narratives that sometimes are simply not true. More importantly, I wish to capture the humanitarian tale amongst this crisis, hoping that in turn, my viewers can be inspired to assist refugees or anyone who has suffered a great loss due to manmade or natural disasters.
Under Florida
When we think about light, it is generally in the context of it projecting through the medium of air. Light reaches onto objects and by its reflection on the surface renders them visible. However, when light projects through the medium of water, it behaves differently. Water acts more like a lens that distorts in a number of ways, bubbles, amplification in size, murkiness, etc. When photography attempts to capture light in the liquid medium it relies on conventions established by the medium of light. The liquidity of light would be a state in which the immaterial of light projecting through water gives it materiality. They both become something else, light becomes a property of the liquid and vice versa: the liquidity of light.
Rendered Complete Equals
Through mixed media painting and drawing, I experiment with the pictorial function of words by deconstructing textual elements alongside organic forms. The integration of collage media provides a way to establish a visual dialogue between both natural and manmade symbols. The resulting imagery is gradually developed through the layering of paint with castoff bits gathered from unexpected sources. Paper scraps, eroded bits of plastic, vinyl lettering, discarded signage, fabric remnants, and old drawings ultimately find links to one another, fitting together much like a puzzle.
Cut and Paste
In my collages, I mine popular visual culture to explore experiences of mood and an altered sense of reality. These collages reflect, through juxtaposition, an experiencing of a reality different from those experiencing consensus-reality, yet simultaneously they remain relatable in a way that forms a new sensibility. Given their small-scale, they function much like snapshots and spontaneous occurrences.
