Artist Biography
Mollie McKinley is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in the Hudson Valley of New York. Her work has been shown at The Contemporary Jewish Museum, My Pet Ram, Fridman Gallery, NADA, Pioneer Works, Independent Curators International, The Museum of Arts and Design, The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, Anthology Film Archives, amongst others. McKinley holds a BA in photography from Bard College, and an MFA in sculpture/dimensional studies from Alfred University. Her works are held in private collections, as well as the permanent collection of the Samuel Dorsky Museum.
McKinley’s work has been featured in Vice, Clocktower Radio, Artforum, The Corning Museum of Glass’ New Glass Review, The Chronogram, Hyperallergic, Fjords Review, and Vernissage TV Magazine. She is a contributor to How-To Kit (2023), co-published by the Walker Art Center and the Dia Art Foundation.
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Artist Statement
Healing is a layered experience known by its transformative outcomes. My work translates the invisible process of healing into textural, visual meditations. I interpret healing transformations through working with the elementals: dripping water, erosions of earth, material formed by fire, and the ephemerality of air. These elements function as tools, materials, and subjects of the work. Their intelligences are my collaborators.
To articulate these intelligences, I combine media into interdisciplinary works. My primary materials are carved and eroded blocks of salt, sheet glass, blown glass, photographs printed on textiles, and neon. I also incorporate written poetry and performance into my practice. To embrace the multidimensional qualities of healing, my work utilizes several languages to create a cosmology: the voices of the elements; the symbolism of Hermetic alchemy; and phenomenology’s approach towards consciousness. Through multiplicity, I bow to the unknown—honoring both the ethereal and the tangible.
Qualities of repair and balance in my work are grounded in my life experience healing from severe illness. My work is informed by ideals of post-humanism that honor the sentience of nature; I unite the ecological health of the earth with the health of human bodies. Symbols of contemporary human medicine, such as infusions, intersect with the organic surfaces of nature in sculptures and photographs. The infusions are often represented as neon, interrupting the romance of pastoral nature. The luminosity of neon, and the photographic flash, become mystic illuminations towards a new interspecies future.
Photograph by Emma Barnes
All content on this site is copyright Mollie McKinley 2010-2023
Land Acknowledgement
Much of my work is made within, and in collaboration with, the lands of the Hudson Valley that are traditional territories of the Lenni-Lenape people, a land called “Lenapehoking.” I acknowledge the Lenni-Lenape as the original people of this land and their continuing relationship with their territory. In my acknowledgment of the continued presence of Lenape people in their homeland, I affirm the aspiration of the great Lenape Chief Tamanend, that there be harmony between the indigenous people of this land and the descendants of the immigrants to this land, “as long as the rivers and creeks flow, and the sun, moon, and stars shine.”
I would also like to acknowledge and honor the role of traditional Haudenosaunee lands and its people, known as the Keepers of the Western Door, where I developed much of my current work in Western New York.