MARIANNE MCCARTHY

-Marianne, we'd love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today, both personally and as an artist.

First, thank you very much for your support of my work. Your curatorial appreciation means a lot to me- it is important to take time to appreciate those who uplift us in our work, so thank you. I suppose my story begins with a family that maintained an open mind around the big questions of life and death, religion, history, science and the tensions that exist between these things. From a very young age, I was clear in my own mind about the hypocrisy and illogicality around what was and was not considered possible or real in our society. My interest as a young person was focused on ghosts and hauntings, which inevitably connected me to history. It always struck me as ridiculous- suspect even- that so many people have experienced anomalous phenomena and yet Western society turns itself inside out to explain these things away, and dismiss them as impossible. Under the auspices of religion however, all sorts of wild and whaky beliefs were accepted without question. This never sat well with me. As I grew up, I grappled with the decision of how best to explore these questions. Art and science felt like two obvious, but sadly opposing avenues. Parapsychology was a shrinking field by the mid 80's, but I still seriously considered it as a possible career path. Ultimately, and through some heartfelt conversations with my father (who was himself a psychologist) I chose the even more ambiguous path of visual art as a way to continue exploring my interests, thoughts about the true nature of reality and the possibility of "impossible" things.

Supernatural phenomena remained a consistent theme in my work throughout college and in my 20's I immersed myself in ghosthunting subculture. This was  before every neighborhood had a ghosthunting group, and WAY before it became a vehicle for so-called reality tv. I found myself traveling to the midwest once or twice a year to connect with small pockets of people who were steadfastly endeavoring to make their own sense of the impossible things they had experienced.

These were some great friends with serious intellect, but most of them were still struggling to operate within scientific parameters. Ghost sightings just cannot be repeated or reasonably quantified within the field in which they occur. At least not yet... haha. Anyway, to make a long story less long, I eventually found myself immersed in a different approach altogether- that of mediumship. My years working with ghosthunters had led me to develop a pretty serious bias against spirit mediums. During ghost investigations, if there was a medium present, I usually found them to be attention-seeking and disruptive to the energy. At some point, I knew these feelings needed to be addressed because my work was moving in a direction that I felt required less observation and more action.

I received a grant from the school where I was teaching to study and practice mediumship at The Arthur Findlay College in England. I wanted to observe and understand exactly what was behind their work and philosophy. Almost immediately I knew this wasn't going to be an exercise in observation alone. If I wanted to truly understand, I was going to have to dive in, in good faith. Those two weeks fundamentally changed my outlook on the human connection to the unseen aspects of our world, and deepened the mystery in truly exciting ways.

Since then, my art has continued to run parallel to my interest in all kinds of anomalous human (and non-human) phenomena. It is surprising how much overlap there can be between (ghosts, ufos, visionary experiences etc.) when you put categories aside. What has remained for me all along is an interest in honoring and attending to experiencer accounts, seeking experiences of my own in order to expand my own knowledge base, and continued support of folks from all walks who forge connections to the unseen despite the ridicule and ostracization they often face.