Nancy Macko

[26][27][28] Macko's wide-ranging work has often taken the form of a quest for identity (recalling feminist artists like Ana Mendieta and Mary Beth Edelson), human interdependence and harmony, that she seeks through the recovery of an archaic, feminine past or in the order and design of nature.

[10][1][2] Critic Gloria Feman Orenstein wrote, Macko's "oeuvre as a whole tells the story of a cosmogenesis, of the rebirth of a lost civilization and its values embedded in the mother-daughter bond … [she] understands how the erasure and denial of our matriarchal history have resulted in our own psychic disturbances, creating a world that is now out of balance.

[25][29][4][30] Her strategy of weaving together vocabularies from diverse investigations—involving honeybees, the life cycles of women, flowers or organic matter, ancient goddesses, and geometric, mathematical or cosmological forms— visually reinforces a key, enduring ecofeminist theme of interconnectedness.

[33] Macko's first large installation, Dance of the Melissae (1993, Brand Library & Art Center), presented a multi-sensory cosmology of wall reliefs, found-object sculpture and digital and handmade images employing sound, scent, taste and visuals to convey the feminine potency of nature, bees and regeneration.

[6][34] The installation took the form of an ancient temple that she based on research into matriarchal cultures, women of the Bible and mythology; its elements included: imagery combining queen bees, bee priestesses, abstracted goddesses and the honeycomb form; eleven displays of bee-related objects perched on pedestals (Stations of the Goddess); a hexagonal floor sculpture made of wax and lead; and Honeycomb Wall, 98 panels containing objects, images and text related to honeybees and the geometry, chemistry and history of honey.

[10][35][13] Presented as a trans-historical odyssey of both social and identity construction, it interwove Macko's characteristic bee imagery, symbolic objects and locations from around the world, and enacted rituals referencing feminine archetypes such as the mother, courtesan, Amazon and psychic.

[44][45] Her "Intimate Spaces" series (2005–14) centered on plant life captured with a handheld macro lens that magnified details and emphasized simultaneously occurring dualities of growth and decay (e.g., swelling stamens and shrinking petals) and beauty and fragility.

[45][3] The billboard-scaled work Meadow depicted the near-abstract blur of color and texture of a distant field of wildflowers punctuated with facets of particularized, magnified moments—e.g., a bee entering the recesses of a flower—revealing the complexity of dynamic organic processes.

[49][4][50] Macko chronicled the arc of her mother's life from youth to cognitive decline through collaged and altered biographical elements (vintage snapshots, handwriting, religious and floral imagery) whose layered abstract quality ultimately gave way to disintegration, fading and a disorder evoking the discomfort, confusion and agitation of dementia.

"[52] With the series "Decompositions" (2021), Macko synthesized longtime themes involving change and transformation, natural life cycles, metaphor and reality, through photographs of the contents of her garden compost pile that hovered between abstract, amorphous forms and recognizable organic scraps.

[32] Critic Eleanor Heartney described them as arresting images of "in-betweenness," whose "delicious state of indeterminacy" evoked mysterious landscapes, human bodies, sea creatures, folds of fabric and art-historical referents such as Hieronymus Bosch and Jackson Pollock.