Jacqueline Maloney currently lives and works in unceded Tsalagi territory, present day North Carolina, in a studio in her off-grid home. 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 unceded Wabanaki territory, or present day Southern Maine. Barefoot afternoons in pine and birch forest and meanderings through tidepools and rocky beaches nurtured an early curiosity, and also a deep sense of relationship to the world beyond the sidewalk. This curiosity has since fostered a deep concern for her species’ relationship to the nonhuman, as she sniffs out the 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.
Through the exploration of form and growth patterns, she probes the seeds and limitations of natural law. How do other beings grow and live? How might humans find direction and meaning through patient attention to the wild world around us?
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These images ask about the role of the human as something of equal significance to every other being. It begs us home, begs for belonging, by way of caring about how our lives touch and are touched by all other lives. How have we strayed from, or broken sharply our sense of place? How may we remember community as a network of human and non-human relationships that upholds the value of its every individual?
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This art is a pilgrimage to the edges; it is a song sung into the spaces of the other People, the ones to whom human people owe our living (furry, feathered, photosynthesizing, and ferrous). It is an admission of ignorance and forgotten wisdom, and an appeal for an earthly education in how to live well here.
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