NANCY MCCALLUM was awarded two degrees by New Mexico State University, receiving her M.F.A. in 1990 and a B.F.A. in 1987.

MCCALLUM’S life is one marked by frequent travel and changes of address. Her perceptions focus on a world in flux; - a meditation on displacement, both psychological and geographic. She currently lives on a hurricane threatened barrier island off the coast of North Carolina. Having left her Minneapolis home of lakes and rivers, her paintings speak of location/dislocation, missed connections, mist and displacement. The island in the fall, winter, and spring is often wrapped in fog, isolated and lonely. Using a recognizable iconography — landscape — she plays a sort of game from which paintings result.

Because she employs recognizable objects and topographies, the paintings appear to be about something specific, although this is primarily an illusion resulting from the process itself. This illusion is carried through with a process of painting image over image, often obscuring the previous painting. MCCALLUM continually sands through layers, in a sense excavating for something in-between the known surfaces. The resulting strata finds past signs and marks that create their own sense of place and atmosphere. These layers of pigment and glaze evoke a sense of the uncertainty, fragility and isolation of MCCALLUM’S current home.

Interested in the contemplative, flawed, and contingent aspects of herself and her location, MCCALLUM embeds these concepts in paintings seeking to memorialize the fugitive and threatened.