ABOUT THE WORK
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.
I develop each painting experimentally through direct engagement with acrylic paint and mediums, water, iridescent pigment and geological materials such as marble dust, sand, and crushed gneiss. Through manual manipulation and maneuvering of horizontally-held panels (which I conceptualize as tablets in the ancient sense of a receptive slab: a tabula receptive to inscription) I work in concert with the materials’ inherent physical properties — processes and forces such as viscosity, fluidity, sedimentation, gravity — to transform the physical materials into a resolved poetic realization referencing and integrating the landscape, plant and animal life, and the human body.
My approach to painting is firmly grounded in my formal training as a ceramic sculptor rather than a painter. This, together with my long-term practices of subtle external and internal attunement — repeatedly walking and observing my local post-glacial woodland and coastal landscapes through the seasons as well as my personal somatic exploration via embodied yoga and other modalities — converge into an improvisational, materially-resonant painting vocabulary of fluidity, sedimentation, gravity, time, breath, movement and indexical color.
Time concretizes a painting’s ultimate terrain as
pigments settle by weight and water evaporates.
BIO
Mary Bucci McCoy (b. 1962) is a painter, trained as a ceramic sculptor, whose intimately scaled, non-objective paintings are materially resonant, poetic meditations on the relationships between the human, animal, vegetal and mineral. Based in Essex County on the coast north of Boston, Massachusetts, she has had solo exhibitions at venues inlcuding Gray Contemporary, Houston, TX; CG2 Gallery, Nashville, TN; Kingston Gallery, Boston, MA; the Artists Foundation, Boston, MA; Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA; and Salem State University, Salem, MA. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions at venues including Museum St. Wendel, St. Wendel, Germany; Boeckercontemporary, Heidelberg, Germany; The Curator Gallery, New York, NY; Marquee Projects, Bellport, NY; Key Projects, Long Island City, NY; Gray Contemporary, Houston, TX; The Neon Heater, Findlay, OH; Aqua Art Miami art fair; Divisible, Dayton, OH; Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Philadelphia, PA; Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH; Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, MA; Merrimack College, Andover, MA; and Emmanuel College, Boston, MA.
She has been an artist in residence at the Studios at Mass MoCA, and her work has also been supported by a merit-based residency grant from the Vermont Studio Center, a Painting Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Faculty Development Awards from Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, MA. Her work is held in numerous private collections.
Mary was born in northern New Jersey and spent her formative years in the greater Philadelphia area. She holds degrees from Tufts University, Medford, MA and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University, Boston, MA. In addition, she has studied ceramic sculpture and glaze technology at l'Ecole des Arts Decoratifs in Geneva, Switzerland (now Haute École d’Art et de Design Genève).
ONLINE:
The Art of Italianità
INTERVIEWS:
Boston Voyager, "Check out Mary Bucci McCoy's Artwork", July 16, 2018
365 Artists, 365 Days, interview, May 18, 2014
Making the Art Seen, artSPACE@16 Online Gallery