Bio

Kathleen McCloud’s art investigates shifting cultural and personal terrain.

Her own migration from White Plains, New York where she was born, to the industrial suburbs of the Midwest and the pristine Rocky Mountains before settling in New Mexico in 1983 is at the core of much of her work. Rooting and wandering, she mixes current events, mythology, history, and Home, in its broadest context, to conjure her visual narratives.

Artist residencies serve as a tether for McCloud as she develops her inquiry based art-projects. She credits Jentel Artist Residency in Wyoming, Santa Fe Art Institute, and the Chhaap Foundation for Printmaking in Gujarat, India for support through their residency programs. Her projects include Open Letters from Hotel Central, a surrealist journey based on an inherited correspondence between Henry Miller and a distant relative, Emil Schnellock; Futurology: Welcome to the Third Wave, which reflects on digital media and the 20th century predictions of Futurist writers Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler regarding its effects on the future of social structures; Meta-Tourist (navigating the life tour as one of 7+billion people on earth), and closer to home, Santa Fe River project which questions the changing definition of what is the‘highest and best use’ of the water as we face climate catastrophe.

“Paintings, print constructions, and tools of enchantment are end points on the journey that each of her projects represent, as it picks up debris and silt from previous ones. Nothing is wasted or discarded. Each piece is part of the web; digested, metamorphosing into something spectacularly different but somehow echoing its origins and alluding to its siblings”. Marina de Bellagente la Palma

McCloud’s paintings, mixed media collages and installations have been exhibited in museums and art spaces across the US and are included in private and public collections including: New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe Community College, Hyatt Collection, NM Central Community College NMAIPP and the Herradura Collection.

Artist Statement

Rooted in traditional materials and processes, my printmaking, painting, and mixed-media constructions reflect a singular fascination: interdependency. Each piece maps the relationships between things, how everything reaches toward something. Through the language of material, color, allegory, and metaphor, I trace those connections and invite the viewer into a world of time travel through the imagination.

The world sits at our fingertips through digital connectivity, yet it is the pre-industrial world, ruled by the rhythms of the seasons and the materials of the earth, that lures me. Through art, song, ritual, and folk medicine, I am bewitched, drawn back to ancestral knowledge and ways.

For over thirty years I have called La Cieneguilla, New Mexico home, a land grant community on the edge of Santa Fe where the living history of indigenous Pueblo and Spanish village life shapes my daily rhythms. The geographic and cultural story written into this landscape roots me in the past and guides my hands toward botanical dyes and paper making drawn from locally sourced wetland materials.

Interdependency lives within my studio as well. There is a constant and complex negotiation between contemporary technology, traditional art making methods, and horticultural practice. Unexpectedly, my studio practice has become a testament to medieval and contemporary collaboration, where the iPhone is no more revered than an etching press or seed starting medium.

Like a folk tale, I am searching for the moment of risk when the edge of the known world grows obscure, and an invitation to leave the familiar opens into a fecund world – one where life lives in the questions.