My works confront notions of the apocalyptic. Not through spectacle or rupture, but through the slow, uneven collapse of ecological and social systems. Nothing ends all at once; crisis accumulates and disperses. Within this prolonged emergency, I look to nonhuman life for models of reciprocity we have failed to sustain.
Through dreamlike, invented environments, I stage encounters between terror and tenderness. Plants act as agents of change, animals hold charged stillness, and skies thicken with heat and pollen. I embrace tension created by juxtaposing vivid, neon and jewel-toned colors with duller grays and beiges. The color red, in particular, plays several important roles throughout. Red: the color of love; passion; war; blood; emergency lights; a foreboding sense of wrong-ness that gets associated with experiences like forest-fire skies, but just as likely the color of a clean water pond tinted by absorption of iron in the soil or tannin from fallen leaves.
In these landscapes, mutation operates both literally and metaphorically. Organisms shift in color and form, adapting to heat, toxicity, and scarcity, while the boundary between the natural and the manufactured collapses. The built environment is not simply imposed upon nature but absorbed and re-formed within it. “Natural” and “artificial” emerge as entangled conditions rather than opposites. Within this entanglement, mutation signals both damage and possibility. It registers contamination and stress while suggesting an improvisational intelligence within matter itself, demonstrating a capacity for adjustment that exceeds human control. I am interested in how this kind of landscape representation can challenge audiences to reconsider their role, and the role of the overlooked and unexpected, within the intersected natural and political world.
Eva Foldy (she/her, b. Cleveland, OH 1994) was raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2016. She received a Masters in Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in May 2026, and has been awarded the Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship for the 2026-2027 academic year, also at VCU. Her work has been published in New American Painting Issue #177. She has always loved drawing.