Good Hart Artist Residency

Maciuba’s current work is a response to the landscapes and communities she currently lives in, most recently, Western Massachusetts, Upstate New York, and the Missouri River watershed. The work, which consists of drawing, printmaking, book arts and animation, considers how humans influence and attempt to change, destroy and recreate the natural environments around them. She shows her work regularly throughout the United States and has participated in artist residencies at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, Fire Island National Seashore, the Lawrence Arts Center, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, the Kathmandu International Artist Residency and the Haystack Open Studio Residency. Currently, she teaches printmaking, drawing and book arts at Mount Holyoke College in Western Massachusetts.

Artist Statement

Through first-hand exploration of the visible and invisible marks of human hands on the landscape my creative practice investigates our relationships with the environment over time, forefronting the impacts of human driven climate change. I expose and reconsider the layered histories of specific locations: from the geologic forces that shaped the land, to impacts of indigenous communities and Western colonialism, to the current practices of development, destruction, and restoration by the local communities I interact with every day. Through a combination of prints, drawings, artist’s books and digital media I call attention to how human actions and climate change are transforming our current environment, and create a space for mourning and reflection on the environments that are already irrevocably altered beyond repair. As I respond directly to the environment in which I am situated, my work examines and critiques representations of place throughout history, highlighting the current and future state of human-driven climate change. 

Bodies of water often anchor my creative investigation. My work has considered the impact of commercial agriculture and flood control on waterways in the Midwest, and the ecological impacts of wetland destruction in the Northeast. In my research I trace the layered histories of watersheds, the surrounding landscapes and the people that are impacted by or impact that watershed in return. I collect and record the natural and artificial alterations I see through a combination of traditional archival research, interactions with communities that reside there now, and what I observe as I wander through the landscape myself. The resulting artworks emphasize the magnitude of these changes across time. 

My work often takes the form of large monoprinted prints and drawings or meticulously crafted artist’s books with repeated and accumulated marks layered throughout. When I study a location I collect a visual library of textures and patterns that represent the space. I then layer a density of marks that accumulate throughout the work, emerging, fragmenting, and receding back again. My layered imagery conflates time and compares and contrasts moments in a space’s history out of sequence. I trace past, present, and future waterways, pathways and geographic boundaries throughout time with a multitude of etched, drawn or digitally layered lines and textures. I use abrupt changes in perspective and point of view to draw the viewer into a world that alternates between atmospheric layers of carefully chosen colors to an ordered chaos of almost controlled markmaking. The colors I choose use subtle value changes, abrupt contrasts and carefully layered color mixing to reflect a place in both the exact moment in time that I was in the location and to help share the story and feel of that specific location with a person who has never been there. I often used collected text as a form of accumulated texture. I write passages that are reflective of the visual landscape or gather text that is relevant to the ecological landscape through meticulous research in archives, historic maps and environmental documentation. The careful layering of patterns, words, colors and images create a visually compelling and layered story of how a landscape has been nurtured and interfered with by human hands over time.

Whether my work is drawn, etched, or digitally constructed it highlights a careful, environmental fragility that stems from the unbalanced ecosystems we have created for ourselves. I want the work to evoke barely controlled chaos and our ever-shifting understanding of human impacts on the world around us. I use the work to question the sustainability of our current policies and actions within cycles of development and destruction of the landscape. By combining my research-based and labor-intensive practices to draw familiar landscapes in exaggerated forms, I reconsider how the physical manifestation of our surroundings have come to reflect our disregard towards them– and ask the viewer to reflect on their own actions in order to imagine an alternative shared future.

< 2024 Residents