The Ohio Artist Registry (OAR) is an exciting opportunity for artists to share their work, connect with the creative community, and establish an online presence—all on a free, virtual platform! The OAR encourages artists working in all art forms, throughout Ohio and beyond, to create a profile, which allows them to better promote themselves and their work. Being listed in the OAR provides artists with new opportunities to share their work with clients, galleries, patrons, and audiences. A listing in the OAR does not confer an endorsement, approval, or verification by the Ohio Arts Council.
For more information, contact Kathy Signorino, artist programs director, at kathy.signorino@oac.ohio.gov or 614-728-6140.
2025 Ohio Artist Registry Juried Exhibition
Molly Cairney
ArtistPataskala Ohio 43062 United States Home Phone: 6145708905 Website: Molly L. Cairney Studio
Bio
I am an artist and arts professional based in central Ohio. I work in collage and fiber and love to research artwork topics, exploring our connection to the environment, history and the artifacts, ephemera, and landscapes that connect us to each other and the past.
Artist Statement
I grew up twelve miles from the Appalachian Trail halfway marker. This region is complicated. Looking south from our front yard I could see two mountains side by side. One, perfectly rising and rolling, was bright green in spring and summer, a riot of color in fall, and frigidly lavender in winter. The other was steadily disappearing into a giant open wound, as a mountain top removal mining company quarried its limestone. Our back yard was a massive garden in constant flux with small ponds, trees, layers of flowers, herbs, shrubs, and vegetables, but also weeds, worms, fungus, and rot. I grew up with that complexity always in my mind. It is what I explore in my art and the lens through which I view life. Nature is wondrous in its ability to renew and rebound, we are stunning in our ability to manipulate and alter it, and that even as we keep trying to make it do what we want, nature protests.
Making art is gardening, mining, and exploring the landscape in ways that help me make gentle order out of the natural chaos of my world. I use recycled materials like mining schematics, seed catalogs, field guides, and maps and work them into my art like compost into soil. I draw portraits of plants, animals, fungus, and insects and layer collaged circles and images that illustrate attempts to manage nature through cataloging, mapping, exploring, and exploiting. I connect the flora and fauna to relationships, blending images like my blended family. The circles and imagery show all the complexities of those relationships. They are ripples of influence, points on a map, layers of understanding, cycles of experience, lenses of focus for close-looking.