In creating the cover of Motif’s Indigenous Peoples Month issue, artist and visual arts teacher Ella Mahoney took her inspiration from her birthplace, Aquinnah, in Martha’s Vineyard, MA.
“Every year, the members of the Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe go to the cranberry bogs, and pick cranberries together,” she relates. “From that, I took images of the past and combined them with images of today.” Mahoney’s cover is a collage incorporating acrylic paints and colored pencils.
Falling on the second Tuesday of October, Cranberry Day is a long-standing Wampanoag harvest celebration in Aquinnah. It honors the final gathering of the year’s cranberry crop, and the community’s connection to the land. Food, stories, and songs are shared.
Mahoney’s cover art was also inspired by the children’s book Cranberry Day: A Wampanoag Harvest Celebration which was written and illustrated by Jannette Vanderhoop, her cousin, and published in 2002 by the Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe Education Department. She cites The Cranberry Harvest People by Camille Madison, too.
Her Indigenous heritage is a major influence on her own work. “For the past five years, I’ve been using the stories that I heard growing up, and incorporating them into my artwork,” Mahoney says.
She describes her painting style as illustrative. “I use a lot of elements of realism. But I like to add some fantastical elements, too,” she says.
Mahoney grew up with an appreciation of the art surrounding her. She remembers watching the people of her Tribe making jewelry or doing intricate beading work. But it was in high school that Mahoney decided to make art her career.
“My marine biology teacher saw me drawing on my arms and told me, ‘You should get a sketchbook and go to art school.’ My family, who were in the arts or adjacent to the arts, encouraged me,” she recalls, adding there are twenty sketchbooks in her old room.
In 2017, Mahoney received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She earned a Master’s degree in Art and Design Education from Pratt Institute in 2022.
Mahoney teaches visual arts to 10th, 11th and 12th graders at the Clinton School in Manhattan’s Union Square. “In teaching high school you get to have a real conversation with these students. They are super-focused and very caring for their art,” she says.
The artist turned to teaching because, as she put it, “Working in a studio can be lonely. And art shouldn’t be made in a bubble.” She’s been a New Yorker for a dozen years now. “I really like the people I find here,” she adds.
Tlingit artist Rachel Martin is among a trio of artists Mahoney is most interested in. Martin uses a sly humor in her drawings of faces, which play with traditional images and with characterization. Sahana Ramakrishnan’s work centers on storytelling with animals in an Eastern style, while Wangetchi Mutu uses pieces of landscape to combine image with story, according to Mahoney.
Working in oil, acrylic and silk painting, Mahoney’s recent work has focused on large-scale silk installations outdoors. They look like banners mounted or suspended from metal supports.
“I’m trying to create a work that can move, and relate to the landscape a little bit more. The longest I’ve left a piece outside is six months,” she says. The artist paints on silk or sailcloth, and sometimes parachute fabric.
Mahoney has done a lot of cyanotype printing over the last few years. “I’m able to use pieces of the landscape,” she explains. In this technique, paper is treated with light-sensitive iron salts, objects – like ferns – are then placed on the paper, and it’s exposed to UV light. The unexposed areas, under the ferns, remain white, while the exposed areas turn a Prussian blue. Cyanotype can be done on silk, too.
The artist has also illustrated children’s books for the Wampanoag Language Reclamation Project and collaborated with such institutions as MassArt and the Long Island Children’s Museum.
She was recently contracted to create an outdoor piece for a hiking trail at the Rock House Reservation in central Massachusetts. “It will be my first outdoor sculpture installation,” Mahoney says. “I wanted to try something a little different, and push myself a little further.”
Mahoney will be working with a fabricator to make metal supports. The silk pieces will be painted with resin to harden them, and then suspended from the metal supports in layers that will evoke the shape of a water ripple.
“Walking underneath those silks, on a breezy day, will be like seeing the ripple effects from a hand touching the water,” she says.
The artist is no stranger to the outdoors. She loves to go climbing, take bike rides, and “do anything around the beach.”
She concludes, “Almost all of my work is based on story, from my Tribe, and incorporated into a lesson for today. I think of it as the continuation of the story.”
Mahoney’s artwork and projects can be viewed on her website ellamahoneyart.com.