Statement 

Virginia Mahoney creates art that echoes the body. Evocative or grotesque, ambiguous yet assertive, the forms are built with elaborate, tedious, and meditative processes -- extended hand work which can spark thematic openings or generate mental notes. In the work’s range of media, strong materiality is a visceral invitation to content. Reclaimed supplies and re-used earlier work imbue history and help maintain a sustainable practice. Mahoney’s use of written or embroidered text is plainly narrative or even dubiously poetic.

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Her most recent work, Holding Thoughts, confronts uncertainty with open-faced admissions of tentativity. Mahoney exposes fears and doubts with handwritten recordings of past sketchbook notes or lists of words in woven container-like forms as holding tanks and evidence. The act of writing or stitching words feels affirming and almost permanent. This is a contemplative act of remembering, honoring, and preserving, processing uncertainty, change, and ruminations on present situations, advancing age and the inevitable. Mahoney tries to hold on to where she has been with these vessel forms that reach out into space in an effort to assert and affirm power, self, mark, and agency.

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Virginia holds an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BA from the University of Florida. A Bromfield Gallery Solo 2022 Winner, her October 2023 show with Nathalie Miebach, “Undercurrents” at Fountain Street Gallery, Boston, was reviewed in Artscope’s September/October ‘23 issue. Her work is currently being shown in a national exhibition at HERA Gallery in Wakefield, RI, “Democracy Under Siege,” juried by Lorenzo Fusi (Chief Curator of the Currier Museum). Additional publications include Juniper Rag (v.3), Hyperallergic, Canvas Rebel, Boston Voyager and WBURArtery. Her work is in private collections and the Lancaster Art Museum (PA). She works in her 14’ x 26’ basement home studio in Massachusetts.