Bio

Macaulay Woods is an American painter trained in filmmaking and video editing. Her work is built for movement — for how images shift and narratives unfold across time. This cinematic sensibility transforms her paintings into ecosystems in motion. Working in abstraction, her canvases hold multiple timelines, gestures suspended mid-action, and stories unfolding simultaneously. Lines and dots come alive; forms flicker, collide, dissolve, and reassemble.

Her recent body of work draws from a theory of line as active force. Animation, rhythm, and free association drive the compositions forward. Brayers and brushes shape action, while biomorphic forms — the “sprites” that populate her canvases — enact loneliness, war, social anxiety, surveillance, and grief. These forms exist in relation to one another, even when isolated, exploring tension, proximity, distance, and connection within negative space.

Lazarus Ball (2024–2026) grapples with surveillance, authoritarianism, grief, and systems designed to silence dissent. Blocks of paint become charged presences, their movement creating rhythm, collision, and disruption. The narrative is cinematic: dots and lines are actors, gestures are plots, and forms move through compressed temporal space.

Woods holds a BFA in Multimedia Studies from Massachusetts College of Art (1994). She has exhibited at SOWA Open Studios, Kathryn Schultz Gallery, University Place Gallery, Gallery at the Piano Factory, Brickbottom Gallery, the Lexington Armory and other venues. She is based in Massachusetts.

Photo by Andrea D. Guerra, 1996, San Francisco, CA