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 across the surface. Lines and dots come alive; forms flicker, collide, dissolve, and reassemble. 

Her recent body of work is informed by Paul Klee’s theory of line as an active force. Animation, rhythm, and free association drive the compositions forward. 

In this work, she approaches painting as action in motion using brayers and brushes. The sprites — biomorphic figures that populate her canvases — move through contemporary political landscapes, enacting loneliness, war, social anxiety, surveillance, and grief.

These forms exist in relationship to one another, even when isolated. The paintings explore what happens within negative space: tension, proximity, distance, connection, and isolation.

Her current Wormhole series (2024–2026) grapples with surveillance, authoritarianism, grief, and systems designed to silence dissent. The work transforms blocks of paint into biomorphic forms and charges them with rhythm, gesture and disruption: the way a mark moves across the canvas. the way forms collide or avoid each other, the way color builds and collapses. The narrative is cinematic in structure; the dots and lines are the characters.

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

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