ARTIST STATEMENT

For over a decade, my work explored the persistence of Cartesian ideas that regard the mind as essentially separate from the material world. My recent work extends those earlier projects to examine how the mind and individual are similarly construed as autonomous from their environment. Inspired by Timothy Morton’s "The Ecological Thought" (2011), Juliana Spahr's post-9/11 poetry, "This Connection of Everyone with Lungs" (2005), Eula Biss' "On Immunity" (2014), and the NIH's Human Microbiome Project, my latest work portrays how environmental space penetrates the body, creating relationships among individuals, species, and objects.

This interpenetration of the body and the “environment” undermines simplistic notions of borderlines between our bodies and the space around us, and radically challenges our imagined separateness from the world. At the level of the breath, for example, the “outside” is always already “inside” rendering such distinctions ambiguous and problematic. My current works represent the intimate connections that the spaces of the respiratory system form among individuals and the environment by inverting space and form: the forms of the sculptures represent the space within and between bodies, while the space around the modeled forms implies the bodies' absent anatomical forms.

BIOGRAPHY

Christopher McNulty is a visual artist who creates sculptural objects, video, and works on paper. His work has explored the limitations of human thought and performance, and the tensions that exist between our ideals and everyday lives. His current work explores how environmental space penetrates the body, creating relationships among individuals, species, and objects. He has exhibited work in galleries and museums throughout the U.S., including the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Blue Star Contemporary Art Center, Rochester Art Center, and Saltworks Gallery in Atlanta. His diverse art practice has been featured in many publications including Art Papers, New American Paintings, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, and The Week.

McNulty has received many grants and awards including an Alabama State Council on the Arts Grant for 2005-2006 and Madison CitiARTS grant in 2001. He has completed artist residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Marble House Project, the Hambidge Center, and the Vermont Studio Center. A dual citizen of France and the US, McNulty holds an MFA degree from the University of Wisconsin and is currently Professor of Art at Auburn University.