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Eva McCauley is a figurative painter and printmaker based in Kenilworth, Ontario. She works primarily in oil paint and encaustic, often incorporating photocopy transfer and photo-collage elements. Her prints are etchings, photo-lithographs and most often large-scale oil-based monotypes, which are sometimes printed on scrims of fabric (silk oraganza) and hung from the ceiling in multiple layers to create an installation. Both the paintings and monotypes are concerned with the disruption of linear time and the process of memory retrieval. Through layering, re-working the image and multiple transfers , the monotypes often feature “ghost” images, physically mimicking the experience of remembering—shifting, temporal and indeterminate. The paintings often combine oil paint, pastel, collage and encaustic, the wax functioning like a veil, to further distance the image and give the illusion of layering the past with the present. Many of the monotypes incorporate images from found black and white photographs from the 1950’s, referencing both individual and collective memory. Memory is haphazard and incomplete, yet it is the way that we order and relate to our experience. McCauley is interested in the “finality” of recorded memory and the intrinsic unreliability of that recording, in how our memories and invariably filtered and skewed by how we choose to interpret and present them. The act of painting cam be viewed as a way of stopping time—as a tangible way to document the process of one's existence. McCauley's work deals with temporality, and the fact that eventually everyone must confront the transitory nature of their lives. Simple objects do not bear the imprint of an individual after they die, but artworks do. We all manufacture stories, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of touch, smell, conversations, sounds and pictures, and we delete most of it trying to keep it in some kind of order, reshuffling it until we die. But in the midst of the sensory bombardment, the creation of an artwork is a distillation of a moment- the coming together of time and space. McCauley has 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 is the recipient of many awards and scholarships, such as: 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), and the Canada Council "Quest" Grant for Emerging Artists (2000). She has exhibited extensively with recent exhibitions (selected) at the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery (KWAG Biennale, 2005--group and "Memento Mori, 2000--solo), Open Studio ("Ruptured Time 2002--solo), Bau-xi gallery, Toronto ("Colour of Memory", 1997--solo; "Mutable as Water", 1999--solo; "Gaze" , 2001---solo). 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, Waterloo Regional Labour Council, and the Ernst & Young Canadian Print Collection. She is a lecturer in the Fine Art Department at the University of Waterloo, teaching courses in printmaking and painting since 2002.
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