ABOUT THE ARTIST
ARTIST STATEMENT
The physical spaces of my home and body are vessels that contain memory. The footprints of my family and woodgrain of the floorboards have pressed together and peeled apart here for multiple generations, creating a living archive of experience. My home holds memories of both violence and tenderness: and my body knows longing and fulfillment. These parallel vessels—structure and flesh—create an intricate dialogue of presence and absence, of what can be held and what must be released. Through my artistic practice of taking rubbings and writing poetry, suspended moments of family history emerge from body and home, binding into gentle and ready fibers of paper and fabric. This speaks to the way trauma and the pursuit of healing moves through generations like water through soil.
The artwork exists in a space between documentation and transformation. Printmaking, sculpture, and performance become acts of witness and release. Moving between domestic space and generational land, my practice investigates how we inherit, carry, and eventually must set down the weight of what came before us.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Cortney McConnell is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose practice investigates the intricate dialogue between the physical spaces of body and home, and the intrinsic memory woven into them. Through printmaking, sculpture, performance, and poetry, she explores how domestic structures and the human body serve as vessels for generational experience. McConnell's work emerges from the intersection of her family's multi-generational home and the surrounding Oklahoma landscape, where she documents and transforms moments of both struggle and tenderness through processes like frottage, writing, and performative release.
McConnell received her BFA from the University of Central Oklahoma and her MFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and publications across the nation. She is the Visiting Assistant Professor of Drawing and Printmaking at the University of Central Oklahoma.