MAYSEY CRADDOCK

Painter and sculptor Maysey Craddock is a native Memphian currently living and working in Munich, Germany. Craddock received her BA in 1993 from Tulane University in New Orleans and her MFA in 2003 from Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine. Since the mid-nineties, her work has appeared in group and solo exhibitions across the United States and, more recently, in Germany.

Her watercolor and gouache paintings on sewn paper bags reflect the strength and promise that can be found in profound change and loss; much of the recent imagery in her paintings comes from post-Katrina New Orleans, where Craddock resided until 2005.

 

Artist's Statement

Terrain

My work seeks to locate and convey a trace of experience and transformation in the objects of our physical world. The imagery in this recent work is largely culled from an exploration of the ravaged post-Katrina gulf coast. This landscape of profound change provides an arena for a dynamic confrontation and inter-play between nature and the manmade. Ghostly trees and architectural ruin are threaded together by a sense of place.

By titling the show Terrain, I am referencing both this sense of place and time as well as the materiality of the paper bags on which I paint. As the reclaimed paper provides a rolling terrain onto which the image clings, so our physical world provides a backdrop for a palimpsest of memory and experience. The trees cling to the earth, standing sentry to change. The things we construct bow to wind and time, reclaimed by nature. The two meet in a middle sea, a terrain of the in-between.

Maysey Craddock
March 2008