In her solo exhibition, “Holding Thoughts,” currently at ArtsWorcester, Virginia Mahoney’s works are composed of sliced paintings covered with handwritten heart leaking words woven into floating vessels.
Thousands of hand inked words from years of journals, are copied onto the strips and some embroidered on top of the ink. Mahoney wrote in an IG entry that stitching was portable, in a year of health issues she could reinforce her own thoughts with needle and thread wherever she was. Mahoney initially is talking to herself, but as she says in her statement she is “putting what’s inside out in the open”.
Her titles read like Emily Dickenson and e. e. cummings in conversation: All The Rabbit Holes — 1, 2, Am I There Yet, Anxious, Cradled, Elizabeth’s Memory, It Weighs on Me, Little Time for Solitude, Look Back to Go Ahead, Maybe Shorthand, One on One, Opening, Peeking Through, Please Listen, Revisit, Sometimes it Gets Dark, Stop, Testing Testing, Waiting, What If.
Look Back to Go Ahead is the title that could summarize this glorious outpouring of work.
Reclaiming, weaving and stitching is Mahoney’s operative process, and the results are ethereal spun sugar visuals. Brilliantly installed by Tim Johnson, spatially separate but unified, the works are suspended with invisible threads and hangers and slowly swivel in space and dance on the walls. With an entire gallery dedicated to this series, the body of work creates a unified vision, provides a magical dreamlike uplift to visitors. All the angst, doubt and questioning that caused the artist to cut up her paintings, write out deeply personal uncertainties on the strips then weave them into fraying floating vessels, all that becomes a vision of hope, enchantment and a soundless music of the spheres.
“I am a list maker” Mahoney admitted to me, but these exceeding personal lists now buried in artistic reformatting, inspire each viewer’s own existential voyage past and approaching, word by discovered word.
There will be an artist dialogue talk by Virginia Mahoney with Toby Sisson this Saturday, November 15, at 11 a.m. Pre-registration is requested.
(“Virginia Mahoney: Holding Thoughts,” the ArtsWorcester 2025 Marlene and David Persky Present Tense Prize exhibition, continues through December 14 in the East Gallery at ArtsWorcester, 44 Portland St., Worcester, Massachusetts. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Sunday from noon-5 p.m. For more information, visit artsworcester.org.)