Mary Cost’s Statement

I tend to work in series, one idea leading to the next, each image building upon the ones that come before, resolving their questions as they arise.  My art is emotional and experiential.  It owes little to formal art theory, but a great deal to the world around me  For the past year I have been working on a series inspired by the architecture that surrounds me here in New Mexico.

I am fascinated by these adobe buildings, created quite literally out of the earth on which they stand; the way weather, hard use, even the imprint of the hands that made them, are recorded in their lively surfaces.  I love the way light and shadow play in their angles, and their pueblo-inspired geometries pile up against the sky. My palette is based on the colors of the Southwest, rusty reds, golden yellows and soft, chamisa greens, often pushed to fanciful extremes.

Mary Cost’s Biography

Having grown up the daughter of a musician and a professor of art history, with a resident grandmother who created hooked rugs from wools she dyed on the kitchen stove, it is hardly surprising that I gravitated to the arts.  First I was a poet, then later I worked in stained glass, but it wasn’t until I moved to New Mexico that I discovered weaving.

I have been most fortunate in the opportunity to study with superb tapestry artists here in Santa Fe — notably James Koehler, my teacher and mentor from 2002 until his untimely death in 2011, and Karen Benjamin, friend, guide and advisor to this day — and to participate in workshops lead by Jean Pierre Larochette, Yael Lurie, Susan Iverson, Susan Martin-Maffie, and Mary Zicafoose, among others.