Mary Connell (b. 1995, Hyannis, MA) earned her BFA at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. She has shown her work in the Greater Boston area and in Providence, RI, with her first solo show in 2021 at the Arts Research Collaborative in Lowell, MA. Connell is currently pursuing her MFA in Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI with an expected graduation of 2025. Her creative work is influenced significantly by her experiences in the environmental science field, which includes working on the Asian Longhorned Beetle Eradication Program in Worcester, MA as an arborist, professionally keeping bees, and working as a park ranger in historic Concord, MA, where transcendentalist thinkers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson lived and worked.

Mary Connell’s creative practice combines painting and drawing, some of humanity’s first imaging technologies, with observations from contemporary micro-imaging technologies such as inverted compound microscopes and Scanning Electron Microscopes. The starting point for this work is blind contour drawings of a variety of specimens are observed, including cross sections from humans, animals, plants and fungi. The methods of preparing specimens for ideal examination also abstract the subject matter, altering color to reveal structures that are inherent to all living things.This generative mode is an automatic, embodied experience that transforms her body into a machine. Connell’s hand is present in the work: meandering lines and annotations point to the subjective observer. The technology mediates her observations, revealing abstracted micro-worlds. Color, scale and tightened depths of fields are all considerations as layers slowly build in the paintings. Her work explores posthuman and feminist theories, science fiction concepts of genetic engineering, and complex histories of Western science. Connell’s work questions the binary between human and nature and expresses a yearning for a more reciprocal relationship.