Carly Thaw grew up in the hills of West Virginia, but she spent nearly 12 years away, living among other landscapes. Montana. Washington State. Vancouver, British Columbia. Different places, different mountains, but wherever she landed, West Virginia kept showing up as a point of comparison.
She never really stopped measuring the world against it.
“All I could do was compare where I was living back to West Virginia because that was my context,” Thaw says.
Distance, it turns out, brought home into focus. She spent that decade away thinking more deeply about the landscape of Appalachia than she ever had while living in it. Now, a year back, she says her eyes and her mind are “tuned up” to see it differently.
This perspective gave Back in Appalachia its title. The exhibition, on display at Carnegie Hall’s Old Stone Room Gallery through October, is a culmination of the past several years of Thaw’s art. It includes older work, some of it made while she lived outside the state, and newer pieces she finished this summer. Even the older work, she says, was about West Virginia and how it differed from wherever she was living. Throughout the collection, she explores patterns in nature and the layering of intricate patterns in nature.
Together, the work reads less like a homecoming and more like a deeper, second look at something already intimately familiar. Looking closely is where Thaw’s art begins.
She is a long-distance trail runner, and she spends a lot of time seeing the same things over and over again, though they never look quite the same. The rhododendron bush on one trail doesn’t look exactly like the one on another.
“You start to see the personalities of the individual landscapes,” she says.
Early on, she enjoyed painting landscapes from life and from reference photos she had taken. When she wanted to dig deeper, she started focusing on the individual components that make up a landscape.
“The deeper I looked, the more intricate it got. If you start looking at an individual species of plant or animal, or some type of geology or rocks that are in a certain place, then you start to learn about the micro-patterns and the chemical and structural patterns that happen with the growth of these things.”
Today she paints the full landscape, or the full being, while thinking about those microstructures and how she might represent them.
“I think I’ve always just been curious about how things work and how things are made,” she says.
That curiosity led her to studying field guides and researching her subjects as she drew them. What began as a question of how to draw a bird grew into a scientific interest. “My interest in the science of it and my art-making are definitely connected,” she says.
Thaw has created graphics and illustrations for science nonprofits, field guides, and science communication organizations. Her website describes her studio work as informed by the science and mathematics underlying ecology and Earth’s living systems, with intricate mark-making drawn from patterns in nature.
She sees the two sides of her work as closer than they might appear. “I really see art as a means of communication—visual communication,” she says. The difference is how directly the message is delivered. When she works with an organization, the goal is to make a specific point clearly. In her studio work, including the pieces at Carnegie Hall, the communication is more abstract.
“Translating a sensory experience into something that you’re looking at on a page is kind of indirect. That’s why I’ve been experimenting a lot with how I’m using color and lines and overlapping patterns inspired by the scientific, structural part, but making it try to communicate something more visceral—making the colors vibrate or making the pattern super dense so that it gives you a sensory experience when you’re looking at it.”
Thaw sees things with a certain depth, and this helps to shape how she portrays Appalachia’s landscape in her work.
“One of the things I think I carried with me out of West Virginia was this kind of intense energy that the mountains have—mountain ranges, the geological features are so enormous that it’s just a certain feeling. Appalachia has a really particular one because the hills are so ancient. I feel like if you’ve talked to anybody that’s from this area, they would have a similar sensation… that sort of visceral feeling is what I’m trying to capture.”
Preservation of natural spaces is her North Star, but what she hopes to do with her studio work is simple: get people to look a little closer, and feel something. According to Thaw, “there’s interesting nature and cool little tiny worlds in your own backyard.” You don’t need a science background, or a deep love for nature to accept the invitation. You only have to slow down enough to notice.
Back in Appalachia by Carly Thaw is on display at Carnegie Hall’s Old Stone Room Gallery through the end of October. To learn more about Carly Thaw and see more of her work, visit CarlyThaw.com.
