Jacqueline Maloney currently lives and works in un-ceded Tsalagi (Cherokee) territory, present day North Carolina. She spends most of her time at home, listening with all her senses to the land where she lives off-grid. She chops her wood and carries her water from a spring at the feet of the Black Mountains.
She has cultivated deep curiosity about the natural world since her childhood, throughout which she lived close to the sea in un-ceded Wabanaki territory (present-day Southern Maine.) Barefoot afternoons in pine and birch forest, and meanderings around tide pools and rocky beaches, nurtured an early curiosity in, and also a deep sense of relationship to, the world beyond the sidewalk. This curiosity has since fostered a concern about her own species’ relationship to the more-than-human, as she sniffs out the historical, economic, and cultural tracks we leave behind us through an unraveling landscape. It is this care that fuels the questions which unfold and augment her drawings and paintings.
artist’s statement
These paintings reckon with a world unraveling, de-syncopating, rearranging itself. They insist that the vast majority of human evolution has fostered a tender wisdom, a wide capacity for attunement with the vast nonhuman world, to which we are intricately bound. They accept that, though a blip in the scale of deep, or geologic, time, the trajectory of our industrialized culture has landed us in a time when the planetary laws and rhythms are changing, our role among the living landscape is in flux, and, along with regular seasons, we've lost the privilege of certainty.
These paintings acknowledge that we find ourselves inside the chaos and possibility of a creation myth, and invite you to respond with your wholeness. For what else is there to do in an origin story but to pay attention, turn your wonder, curiosity and tenderness upon the world around you, and collaborate with your kin to find a way to live it well? Ask, "who lives here, around me?" Ask, "how might we take care of one another?"
current representation
Jacqueline is proud to be learning, listening, and working in collaboration with the international Creative Ambassadorship of the Land Art Agency: https://www.landartagency.com/
The Art Shop at Moore, Philadelphia, PA
Jacqueline is also a member of Yancey County's
