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

Her own migration from White Plains, NY where she was born, to the industrial suburbs of the Midwest 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.

With a background in textile restoration and writing, including content creation and production of audio tours for museums and cultural sites, her artwork presents as a multi-layered contemporary story within an epic narrative. Through an interweave of fact- fiction, materials and imagination, she communicates the influence of the past upon the present and the disruption that occurs when the narrative shifts as it clears the way for something new. Materials do the heavy lifting, grounding ideas into alchemical and biological realm that leapfrogs thinking and permeates the senses.

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; Meta-Tourist based on a trip to India reflecting on life on a planet of 7 + billion people with the spinning wheel at the center around which she spins her fabrication of peaceful coexistence, and closer to home, the Santa Fe River project which questions the changing definition of what is the ‘highest and best use’ of 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 constructions 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.

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