Jacqueline Maloney currently lives and works at the foot of a 6,000 foot mountain in present-day Southern Appalachia. She spends most of her time at her home, using all her senses to learn from the land where she lives off-grid. She chops wood to heat her one-room living space, cooks outside all year-round, and carries her water from a spring.
She has cultivated deep curiosity about the natural world since her childhood, throughout which she lived close to the sea in 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. That early sense of kinship has grown into a strong sense of responsibility to listen to, and advocate for, our more-than-human kin. She spends a lot of her indoor time taking in the stories that have nearly been brushed from the paths that led here, examining the tracks an industrialized society has made through cultures, economies, habitats and histories. She seeks to understand why she was born into an unraveling landscape, to learn how she and other humans might mend the ruptures between our life ways and those of other species, and to apply what she learns to her every day life.
artist’s statement
Jacqueline Maloney's gouache and mixed media paintings redefine Place as (not only human) People. The work expands the space of Protagonist to include the more than human world. The human in her images is exalted as a Benevolent Steward, who carries a birthright of tender wisdom that they source from a deep yearning for relationship. Scenes of interspecies communities, what we call 'Places', reveal ornately interconnected lives: elemental, vegetal, microscopic, mycelial, faunal, seasonal.
These paintings reckon with, and respond to, shifting ground. Along with the regularity of our seasons, we've lost the illusion of certainty. Planetary laws and rhythms were once the province of Deep Time and aeons, and are now subjected to a blip of a few hundred years of human history. As the instigating species of economies so mercilessly extractive that we have altered entire earth systems, we come uncomfortably face-to-face with the nature of (our) power here. We find ourselves inside the chaos and possibility of a creation myth, where it matters very much to everyone here with us, and everyone on their way, how we wield our power, and to what end. So, then, these paintings also document the origin story we are living. They recollect how Earth heals herself through creativity and adaptation, and so they make space for mystics, monsters, and a queering of relational norms. They offer kinship as a process that mends, from which resilience emerges. They suggest that, when one wakes within an origin story, it is time to pay attention, gather one's senses, seek community, and move with care.
What happens when we turn to face imbalances, injustices, and cataclysm, and respond with curiosity, tenderness, and willingness to be with? When we remember that the word, "apocalypse" originally meant "a revealing"? What happens when we reach out for relationship and collaboration with those standing across inherited divisions? What actions, behaviors, or perspectives do the work of repairing our inner worlds AND outer?
These paintings 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
