ELIZABETH MOONEY ARTIST STATEMENT

Nature is a mirror.  We can see reflections of how we treat ourselves and each other in how it has been developed and inhabited.  My current body of work layers abstract gestures with representations of the everyday that I find within the landscape.

In the past, my work examined how the desire to aestheticize landscape has shaped our perception of it.  I was interested in challenging ideologies of beauty within North American Landscapes. I also made work about how speed has impacted our engagement with landscape. I made kinetic paintings and sculptures that fused digital and analogue technologies of industry and travel.  Recently, the work has shifted to use a local visual vernacular to highlight how the complications of our current political state are made visible in our most immediate landscapes.  These works are an attempt to punctuate how the inequities of people and communities can be reflected in even the most subtle details of our neighborhoods.

During walks in my neighborhood I notice piles of concrete, strewn bricks, trees woven into chain link fences, and clusters of poison ivy dotted throughout.  I often think about how these objects signify human decisions that vary in scale of impact, and accumulate into a blend or amalgamation of our presence.  Each neighborhood encounter reveals lasting moments that are being woven into our future.

My paintings are inspired by what I observe during these walks.  The work presents a vantage that can be both bucolic and destabilizing.  Intentionally worked, multi layered, carved, thick with impasto, and spray painted, the painting’s surfaces create spaces that are dense and disorienting.  In each painting, areas of the hand-built panel’s wood grain surface and structure are exposed. The accumulation and simultaneity of these many gestures, images, and techniques refer to the multilayered and often overworked grind of everyday lives.

As an avid urban gardener I am acutely aware of the resilience, beauty, use and history of the plants that appear in my paintings.  Dandelion, stinging nettle, pennyroyal, mint (among many others) inhabit my most recent paintings.  These plants offer a range of medicinal benefits; specifically for people who menstruate, presenting glimpses of beauty, resilience, and offerings for natural reproductive and mental health. My most recent body of work holds contradictions; an unraveling landscape balanced by nature’s power and potential to support humans in a regenerative way.

© mooney 2025