Cynthia Gregory

As a multi-media artist, my studio work has encompassed drawings, sculptural installations, and book arts. My most recent studio direction integrates sculptures and furniture forms that make direct references to poetry, plant formations, and astronomy. Drawing from this subject matter, I build a personal visual vocabulary of the experiential, tactile world of the everyday that conjures the realm of wonder and dream. I root my working methods firmly in the idea “of the hand, by the hand,” using humble materials of paper, wood, clay, and salvaged building materials to hand build sculpture installation pieces that house delicately rendered sculptures. My style of making leans toward a realism that is less concerned with fooling the viewer’s eye and more concentrated on encouraging what Philip Rawson refers to as the viewer’s “habit of attention,” that is to be drawn in, to dismantle assumptions, to re-evaluate, and unravel what’s seen. My interest is in the potential for the sculptures to serve as holders of the poetic within self-contained installation environments that range from boxes, drawers, architectural elements, and table formations. The objects I populate in these intimate spaces map subtle, mysterious markers of experience, thought, and feeling, and they encourage the viewer to build implied, partial narratives of their own from a lost or unknowable whole.

Cynthia Gregory is an artist whose studio work integrates sculpture, drawing, and woodworking to illuminate themes of time, history, accumulation, and containment. She has exhibited her artwork in national and international exhibition spaces including the Evansville Museum of Arts, History and Science; Herndon Gallery (Antioch College, Yellow Spring, Ohio); Bradley University Galleries; Indianapolis Art Center; Manifest Gallery; Kalamazoo Book Arts Center; Budapest’s Raday Kesehay Gallery; and Blue Star Contemporary Museum of Art (San Antonio, Texas), which selected Gregory’s work in 2015 for juried solo exhibition. Gregory has been an artist-in-residence at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, Nebraska as well as at Georgia’s Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts & Sciences. She holds several degrees including an MFA from the University of Cincinnati.