Eileen MacAvery
About the Artist
Eileen MacAvery is a Hudson Valley–based multimedia artist whose work explores the intersections of memory, family, spirituality, community, and the natural world. Working across photography, video, digital art, collage, and mixed-media installation, she creates projects that center lived experience, particularly women’s stories and the quiet strengths that shape identity over time.
Encaustic | Mixed Media Artist
Her multidisciplinary works include Her Six Word Story, Familiar Places, Liminal Spaces, The Ghosts We Live With, LoveSense, and East End Stories. MacAvery is a Fulbright-Hays Scholar and a multi-year New York State Council on the Arts grant recipient. She has exhibited widely in solo, juried, and featured exhibitions throughout the Hudson Valley and beyond, including installations for Upstate Arts Weekend and her 2024 Artist-in-Residence exhibition at All for One, One for All Farm.
MacAvery is an Associate Professor of Art at SUNY Rockland Community College, and she also teaches yoga, meditation, and walking movement workshops. Her practice integrates these disciplines into a reflective, embodied approach to artmaking.
Artist Statement
My work is rooted in the lived experience of being a woman, navigating memory, family, community, and the natural world while carrying the stories that shape us. Across photography, video, digital art, collage, and painting, I explore the subtle but powerful spaces where resilience is formed: where wounds and beauty live side by side, where silence begins to speak, and where a moment of clarity can change the direction of a life.
As a lifelong yogi and meditation practitioner, I approach creation through presence and attentiveness. I listen for what rises: fragments of memory, inherited stories, gestures of care or loss, and shifts of light that seem to hold a truth. These small threads often reveal deeper narratives about persistence, connection, and the quiet strength women cultivate as they move through the world.
Many of my projects, including Her Six Word Story, The Ghosts We Live With, Familiar Places, and Liminal Spaces, grew from witnessing women’s experiences that are too often condensed, overlooked, or left unspoken. Through image, text, and time based media, I create openings where these stories can surface with honesty and dignity. I am interested in the ways personal histories overlap with collective ones and how art can hold space for both vulnerability and power.
My encaustic series Scarscapes began with photographing women’s scars and listening to the stories behind them: where each scar came from, how it was formed, and what it has come to mean over time. These conversations became the foundation for the work, allowing personal narratives to shape both form and process.
The resulting encaustic surfaces are layered, fractured, luminous, and shifting, echoing the ways women carry scars that are both visible and unseen. Built through heat, pressure, erasure, and repair, the works reflect processes of wounding, healing, and transformation. Drawing from mastectomy, cesarean, and needle biopsy scars, each piece reimagines the body as a landscape of strength, survival, and natural wonder, shaped by time, trauma, and resilience.
