Artists Biography
Mary Ahern is a multi-disciplinary artist using paint, pixels, sound, and soil to explore the healing counterbalance between centering and chaos. Her work begins in the garden she designed and has tended in Northport, New York, for more than three decades. For most of that time, the garden has been where she goes when life gets loud. Time among the plants, looking closely at a single flower, brings her back to balance. Her art grew out of that practice.
The large, close-up flowers Ahern is known for are inspired by the balance she sees in the garden, where growth, decay, and renewal keep each other in check. She layers these blooms with imagery of the galaxy, where a complementary balance plays out on a vast scale. Seen together, the very small and the very large offer the same lesson: we need harmony and balance to thrive. Her training in botanical illustration at the New York Botanical Garden, studying plants under microscopes and magnifiers, taught her the close looking behind this work, and that looking became its own kind of meditation.
Ahern moves easily between tools, choosing whatever a piece calls for. She works in video and still imagery, digital and traditional painting, assemblage, installation, and garden design, and she sees no hard line between them. A painting may begin as a photograph from her garden, take shape on the computer, and be finished in oil on canvas. To her, designing a landscape is much like building an assemblage or an installation: gathering materials and giving them form, focus, and narrative.
For decades, Ahern worked on instinct, sensing that slowing down to look at a flower did something real, for her and for the people who stood in front of her work. Her practice is closely connected to neuroaesthetics, the study of how art and beauty affect the brain and body, which gave her language for what the garden had been teaching her all along. Her immersive installations bring together flower video, sound, living plants, and water to recreate the calm she finds outdoors. She carries the same ideas into her writing, sharing what she has learned about art, nature, and healing in magazines and online publications.
Ahern has always been an early adopter and an entrepreneur. After earning her degree in Fine Art in 1980, she studied computer programming at Columbia University and, as a single mother, sold computer graphics equipment to the broadcast television industry. Having experienced a concussion on the glass ceiling, she founded her own technology-driven graphic design business in the early 1990s and in 1995 began designing websites for her clients. Exactly twenty years after her first degree, she earned a second in Ornamental Horticulture and turned her love of gardening into landscape design.
Ahern has exhibited widely, including in museums and arboretums, and her work is held in collections throughout the United States and internationally. She is represented by Ceres Gallery in Chelsea, New York.
Click here for my Artist’s resume or here for my Artist Statement.