About
MECA Post-Baccalaureate in Art Education 2010
RISD BFA Sculpture 1991
Following certification in 2010, Mary taught at Fiddlehead Center for the Arts, Mt. Ararat High School and Middle School, Mountain Valley Middle School and Monmouth Middle School. She has been teaching visual arts at Gray-New Gloucester High School since 2015. She works in photography and mixed media.
Gallery
Artist Statement
My first flower shot on Instagram was March 8, 2014. It’s a rather boring shot of a crocus peeking up through the previous year's dead grasses. I was teaching at Mountain Valley Middle School, which required just over an hour commute one way. Crocuses are full of hope for the coming spring but I was about to be cut from my second teaching position in two years. My own children were 10 and 12 and daily life was full of lots of driving and the juggling of commitments and responsibilities that come from teaching and mothering middle schoolers.
As I look back through my images, the flower series grows and becomes more frequent through that spring and summer. Who doesn’t love flowers? During a busy and stressful time, it was a quick way for me to document literal growth as well as to play with composition and light. My first “deadthing” photograph was a little over a year later; it was a june bug and I called it #notatuliptoday. The images of flowers continued through the years, collectively becoming a story of the changing of the seasons and cycles of growth. The actual #deathings series itself didn’t start until about five years later. In May of 2019 an unfortunate mouse went through our washing machine. I removed it with my bare hands because I thought it was a ball of lint. Being both horrified and fascinated at the results, of course I took a picture.
The twin series of flowers and #deathings is like two sides of the same coin to me. I am always playing with composition and light and I am always looking for beauty in expected and unexpected places. Image-making is an easy, daily practice that I can sneak into a quick moment when something catches my eye. Flowers are easy to like, but I find beauty in the #deaththings, too.
For this project I wanted to strengthen the connection between the two series and to take the images beyond mere social media posts. The theme of “Post: Examining the Afters” pushed me to search for a way to honor years of quick uploads. Life is different for me now with older children continuing and entering college and I’ve been at the same, nearby school for six years. How could I turn this work into something more lasting and meaningful?
I opted to create negative transparencies from five flower shots and five #deaththings shots and used the cyanotype process to print them as positives on both watercolor paper and cotton.
In Flowers and #deadthings v1 I made a dos-à-dos book structure to display all ten images on watercolor paper. The dos-à-dos structure binds two separate books together with a shared board that is the back cover of both. Five flowers are sequential in one direction and five #deadthings are sequential in the other direction.
In Flowers and #deadthings v2, I printed the images on cotton squares. Searching for connections between the images, I cut the images apart and pieced them together in oppositional pairs, allowing legs and wings to echo stamens and pistils and hopefully drawing the viewer in for a closer look with appealing patterns.
How do we define what is beautiful and worthy of composition? What do we take for granted? What do we dismiss? In their monotone range of blue, my goal is for the cyanotypes to give the images in both series a level playing field, enhancing the compositional structures, the balance and interplay of lights and darks and ideally making it easier to experience both expected and unexpected beauty.