Maggie Cardelús is a Paris based, American/Spanish artist and designer. For her photo-based work comprised of wall pieces, sculpture, installations, video, and performance, she relies heavily on meticulous handcraft to explore the formal, material, and psycho-socio-mnemonic forces at work within and around photographic images. Spilt-Sun, her most recent body of work, revisits American landscape photography using crude oil as a painting medium in order to create evocative works that suggest a new, more problematic American identity brought about by the burning and spilling of fossil fuels. Cardelús’ artwork has also been a way to meet the complex challenges of serious art-making while attending to the demands of parenting. For over two decades, Cardelús blurred the boundaries between studio life and domestic life by taking the power of art-making into the home and taking the emotional challenges of family life into the artwork. Individual and relational issues were processed mostly through the making of cut-out portraits, and as her children grew, they participated and performed in her work. Twenty-five years working in this way generated an extraordinary body of work—an expanded photo album— that traces a family’s emotional history. The artworks found new homes along the way in numerous international public and private collections including the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, the Norton Collection, the Fondation Salomon Collection, the Thaddaeus Ropac Collection, the Caixa Foundation Collection, the Nanette Gherig Collection, the Mario Testino Collection, and many more. In 2012, Cardelús and her family moved from Milan to Paris where she worked increasingly on privately commissioned, project-based family portraits for which she was able to use her extensive relational experience to create powerful, heirloom artworks that captured the psychic character of a family. In contrast to this, her interest in proto-photographic activities brought about an exploratory study of traditional needlepoint (pixels) for a body of work that is now in progress. Cardelús also began to accept invitations to design for fashion and design brands, her most recent project being for Sonia Rykiel's 2018 Atelier collection. Cardelús holds a BA from Wellesley College, a MArch from Columbia University, and a MFA from Hunter College in NY. Her engagement with the history of photography and memory has led to a number of publications and invitations to speak publicly about her work and teach in undergraduate and graduate art programs. Cardelús is presently Lecturer at the Art, Media, and Technology department at the New School Parsons Paris and has a small consulting firm, PortfolioWorksParis, for portfolio review and preparation for university admission. She is also the recipient of numerous awards and grants with which she has explored her interest in traditional crafts in various international artist residencies.