ARTIST STATEMENT

I am a Canadian painter and printmaker with over thirty years of studio practice, currently based in Bear River, Nova Scotia. My work is rooted in landscape and memory, moving between the seen world and an interior, dreamlike space. Over time, my focus has increasingly shifted toward the climate crisis—its emotional, psychological, and ecological impact.
Recent exhibitions, including my two-part project Cataclysm in Canada and Ireland, explore ecological grief, climate anxiety, and our relationship to fragile environments. I use layered surfaces, veils of colour, and atmospheric space to suggest both beauty and instability, working across painting, printmaking, installation, and multimedia collaboration.
My new project, We Cling to Beauty as the World Falls Apart, extends this inquiry by centering the people whose lives intersect with damaged landscapes. The portraits, printed on translucent organza scrims, are larger-than-life and suspended in space so they drift, merge, and disappear as viewers move. Their vulnerability echoes the instability of the world around us.
The accompanying large-scale seascapes depict ravaged, storm-battered environments—burnt skies, eroded coastlines, flooded streets and toxic waters. The transparency of the scrims allows the portraits to float over these landscapes, evoking the way climate change exists both everywhere and at the edge of perception.
My aim is not to illustrate disaster, but to create spaces where viewers can feel their way into the
complexity: love of place, fear for the future, responsibility, denial, and hope. The work asks us to look directly at the human cost of climate change while acknowledging the beauty and resilience that still persists.

BIOGRAPHY: Eva McCauley is known for vibrant, colourful paintings that seamlessly merge abstraction with figuration. Her paintings are enigmatic and evocative psychological takes on the traditional landscape genre. She is both a painter and printmaker, known for her atmospheric, expressive paintings of sky, water and shifting landscapes that incorporate human figures,  exploring the passage of time and the transient and ephemeral nature of the spiritual and physical world. As a figurative artist she is fascinated with the human condition, and the fragility of our existence.

She lives in Bear River, Nova Scotia.

Her work explores the process of recollection and how we process memories. Her focus is not on the recreation of a specific image or moment, but the creation of something informed by the act of remembering -- an act which renders past experiences as ephemeral, and constantly in flux, resulting in works which perpetually shift, their images lyrical, ghost-like, and ethereal.

She studied visual art at the Ontario College of Art and Design, receiving an O.C.A.D. diploma in drawing & painting (1983), a B.F.A. from University of Guelph (1994) and a M.F.A. from University of Waterloo (1996).

She has exhibited internationally and nationally, with solo exhibitions at the Rotunda Gallery in Kitchener, ON (Ruptured Landscapes, March/April 2024)), Galerie-Pere-Leger-Comeau at U. Ste. Anne in Church Point, N.S. (Les paysages bouleversés, 2023); Elora Centre for the Arts, Elora, ON (Splendid Isolation, 2022); ArtsPlace Gallery in Annapolis Royal, N.S., (Splendid Isolation, 2021), the Rotunda Gallery, Kitchener, ON (Face to Face Project, 2018), Artery Gallery, U. of Waterloo (Face to Face Project, 2017);  St. Thomas Elgin Art Centre (World’s Edge, 2014);  Lavit Gallery in Cork (In/Visible, Aug/Sept. 2012); Limerick Printmakers (In/Visible, August/Sept. 2010); Elora Centre for the Arts, Elora, Ontario, and Harbinger Gallery, Waterloo (Solas agus Scáth‎, 2009),   Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery (Momento Mori, 2000); Open Studio, Toronto (Ruptured Time); Bau-Xi Gallery, Toronto (Colour of Memory, Mutable as Water, Gaze); and solo and group exhibitions at Harbinger Gallery, Waterloo; Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery 2nd Biennale (2005); and the Castellani Museum in Lewiston, N.Y. (Crossing Borders). Her work is included in collections in Canadian Embassies all over the world and is part of a Canadian boxed set collection sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

McCauley is the recipient of many awards and scholarships, including the W.O. Forsythe Painting Award (1983), Bronfman Printmaking Award (1993), Warner Lambert Printmaking Scholarship (1994) "Best in Printmaking Award" at the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition (1996), "Ernst & Young Purchase Award" (1996), a Canada Council "Quest" Grant for Emerging Artists (2000), several  Ontario Council Project Grants, as well as two Region of Waterloo Arts Fund grants in 2017 and 2019. Most recently, in 2022,  she was awarded an Arts Nova Scotia “Creation” Grant to fund her painting project Ruptured Landscapes,  that was recently exhibited at the Galerie-Pere-Leger-Comeau at U. Ste. Anne in Church Point, N.S. 

She is working toward a solo exhibition at the Saint John Art Centre in May/June 2026. 

Her work can be found in many private and public collections such as the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Workers Art & Heritage Centre (Hamilton ON) , the Ernst & Young Canadian Print Collection, the UNB Art Centre Permanent Collection (Fredericton, NB) and the Nova Scotia Art Bank Collection.

She is represented by Agora Gallery in Stratford, Ontario.