Maysey Craddock, Edgelands

New York, NY— The works in Maysey Craddock’s fifth solo exhibition, Edgelands, mine the in-between spaces in the diminishing wildernesses of southern wetlands. They chase captured moments in the life cycles of forests, marshes and estuaries, illuminating transition and transformation in a dissolving world. Forming and unforming, these spaces unfold and regenerate ceaselessly, fragmenting into reflection and continually settling into new iterations of themselves.

She works form imagery based on her own photographs of ephemeral landscapes, from which abstracted drawings are rendered and then transferred onto a substrate of sewn-together fragments of found paper bags. Layers of gouache are laid over the terrain of the paper, conveying atmosphere and a recollection of the story of these spaces. This process of making and unmaking multiplies in materiality and image, mirroring the natural and geological processes that inform her work.

Greatly impacted by the present era of terrifying climactic disruption, she creates to offer a kind of song about these spaces, an elegy for natural systems that are daily being consumed by development and encroachment. She does not consider them grand vistas, but rather they are unnoticed/unseen places between known worlds: bits of marshy bog left standing in a subdivision, fallen trees on the edges of a creek abutting farmland, Spanish moss framing a meadow marsh behind a road. These are places of persistence, tenacity and beauty, providing rare and precious habitat in a landscape that is being rapidly consumed and altered for human use. Her paintings offer the viewer a visual back and forth, echoing wild spaces as ever-shifting repositories for impermanence, disintegration and the inevitability of change.

Maysey Craddock: Edgelands is on view September 5 – October 12, 2019 at Sears-Peyton Gallery’s Chelsea location at 210 Eleventh Avenue. There is an evening reception September 5 from 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. Gallery Hours are 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. For more information or to request further press images, please contact the gallery at [email protected].