Mary McCoy

About the Artist

Mary McCoy is an environmental artist and writer. Her interdisciplinary artwork includes both indoor and outdoor installations, sculpture, artist’s books, drawing, and painting, often with the inclusion of text and with an emphasis on found natural materials. Her solo work and collaborations with Howard McCoy have been exhibited in the U.S., Ireland, Wales and New Zealand, notably at Adkins Arboretum, Ridgely, MD; Washington College, Chestertown, MD; Academy Art Museum, Easton, MD; Lake Roland Park, Baltimore, MD; Salisbury University, Salisbury, MD; BlackRock Center for the Arts, Germantown, MD; Loyola College, Baltimore, MD; Cardigan Heritage Center, Cardigan, Wales; Spirit Square Arts Center, Charlotte, NC; C.A.G.E., Cincinnati, OH; Brody’s Gallery, Washington, DC; “Spirit of Place,” Huntington, VT; Georgetown College, Georgetown, KY; Gallery 10, Ltd., Washington, DC; and the International Sculpture Conference, Dublin, Ireland. Her writings have appeared in Orion Magazine’s Place Where You Live, ESWA’s Bay to Ocean, Gargoyle, and Salisbury University Art Galleries’ Here/Not Here. Her artist’s books include three printed books, The Turning Year, Iceland, and Tree Tales, available on www.blurb.com, and numerous handmade artist’s books. She is a former art critic for The Washington Post, Sculpture, New Art Examiner, American Craft, and The Washington Review and currently writes for The Chestertown Spy and The Talbot Spy.  

Artist's Statement

Humans are naturally curious beings with an inborn urge to collect and scrutinize interesting bits of nature. Building on this innate childlike sense of wonder, my work chronicles my own witnessing and integration of encounters with natural phenomena and plays on the animistic view that all nature has consciousness. To counter the increasingly self-referential attitude of our culture, I take cues from myth, folklore, and archetypal motifs concerned with how traditional peoples have approached their relationship with the earth. Using the corporeal presence of natural found materials combined with drawing, painting, photography, and text to create a dialogue hovering between comedy and dissonance, I aim at stirring a personal felt response in the viewer, an invitation to reassess how we think about the natural world and our place within it.