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.
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?"
