Cedra Wood
lives in Roswell, NM
born in Amarillo, TX
cedrawood.com | @cedra.wood
Looking at Cedra Wood’s paintings feels a little like finding a secret door to enchanted lands. Wood understands a connection between the outer wild terrains and the inward ones. Her art celebrates both realms as essential and beautiful, linked by mythos. The worlds she depicts evoke something of the hero’s journey. “Allegorical paintings and drawings, the final documentation of these experiences and artifacts dwells on ideas of survival and belonging,” writes the artist.
Wood draws the viewer into these experiences, sometimes through the insinuation of human characters who “mimic the tactics of better-adapted creatures.” Complex and labor-intensive costumes, props, and tools constructed from natural materials adorn and gird these characters, situating them in their environments. The results are at turns comical, wistful, discomfiting, or surreal.
Wood received her BA from Austin College and her MFA from the University of New Mexico. She has received grants from the Land Arts Mobile Research Center, the Harwood Emerging Artists Fund, the Puffin Foundation, and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation. She has been a research fellow at the Nevada Museum of Art’s Center for Art + Environment and artist in residence at Teton Artlab, the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, PLAYA, Ucross Foundation, and the Sagehen Creek Biological Field Station. Internationally, Wood has had residencies at Gushul Studio and Kluane Lake Research Station in Canada and The Arctic Circle, a ship-based residency in Svalbard.
