Mary Bucci McCoy

Lives and works in Massachusetts, USA

Artist statement

My studio practice is an exploration of the subtle depths of our current human situation and identity in relationship with the mineral, vegetal, and animal through non-objective, intimately scaled panel paintings offered as quietly poetic spaces of self-reflexive focus. In an era fraught with existential challenges, my work is driven by the necessity of grounding both internally and externally to enact meaningful change. I work with fluid acrylic, iridescent pigments and geological aggregate materials (such as marble dust and green gneis) on plywood panels prepared with gesso. Holding the panels in my hands as I work, I conceptualize them as tablets in the ancient sense of a receptive slab: a tabula receptive to inscription. My training as a ceramicist, rather than a painter, and my long-term practices of subtle external and internal attunement — repeatedly walking my local post-glacial, post-colonial landscape through the seasons as well as my personal somatic exploration via yoga and other modalities — converge into an improvisational, materially-resonant painting vocabulary of fluidity, sedimentation, gravity, time, breath, movement and indexical color. As I breathe and move, tiny air bubbles inscribe lines through iridescent pigment, encoding shifts in orientation and relationship to gravity. Water bleeds pink from black micaceous iron oxide. Time concretizes a painting’s ultimate terrain as pigments settle by weight and water evaporates.

Artwork