Cris Worley Fine Arts is pleased to present hinterland, a solo exhibition of Maysey Craddock’s paintings on found paper bags,beginning with an opening reception Saturday, March 31st from 5:30-8:30pm. Craddock’s studio is located in downtown Memphis in an old medicine factory at the end of a dead-end street. She notes that her studio space is surrounded byabandoned and rundown warehouses, a fitting space for the artist who is “drawn to the forgotten, to the mysterious traces ofmemory in our physical world.”
Craddock’s subjects range from leafless trees to dilapidated buildings and fences in the middle of nowhere. The use of raw paper only adds to the delicate and tactile nature of decay in each painting’s content. She describes her imagery as, “Neglected and abandoned, [my paintings] are full of debris, detritus, an active collapse.” While Craddock’s work is based on specificscenes, her process abstracts the image. She starts with photographic documentation of her subject and then begins an intricate process of tracing, drawing, and layering gouache that removes the origins and captures the essence of the image.
Maysey Craddock completed her BFA at Tulane University in 1993 and continued on to Maine College of Art where she received an MFA in 2003. She exhibits frequently across the United States and in Germany and has received several grants and artist residency awards over the course of her career. Her work is currently in the collections of the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock, Brooks Museum of Art in Memphis, Rocco Forte Hotel Group in Munich, Germany, Federal Express, and Pfizer Corporation, among others.