Opening Reception: Jackie Boyd: In the Making

In the Making, presented through Stanek Gallery’s OUTSIDE THE BOX programming, marks the debut of Jacqueline Boyd’s Ephemeral series, a new body of modestly scaled mixed media works that lingers in the space between making and memory.

Built through an intuitive and evolving process, the series brings together reworked collages on watercolor paper, hand-cut forms, handmade stencils created from botanical elements gathered in the artist’s own garden, graphite, acrylic, colored pencil, and layered Japanese papers. In other works, fragments of handwritten words drawn from personal and familial histories quietly emerge, weaving intimate layers into richly textured surfaces. Each work is both an arrival and a trace. Ephemeral speaks to the nature of creation itself, where every mark, every decision, and every shift in direction exists only once before passing into memory.

The thoughts and emotions that guided each composition are inseparable from the moment in which they were made, carrying with them the accumulated weight of lived experience while remaining beautifully impossible to recreate. Though the act of making is fleeting, the finished works hold those moments with quiet permanence. Layers of paper, pigment, graphite, and language become vessels for instinct, reflection, and remembrance, preserving what would otherwise disappear. Each piece is less a record than a residue of presence, where process remains visible beneath the surface and time settles into form.

With In the Making, Boyd invites viewers to consider the fragility between the impermanence of creation and the enduring presence of the artwork itself, where each piece stands not only as evidence of a momentary experience, but also as a monument to its lasting resonance. Together, these works become meditations on transformation, honoring the brief and often invisible moments of creation while revealing how something lasting can emerge from what was always destined to pass.

Join the artist for the opening reception of In the Making at The Sperlak Gallery & Sculpture Gardens in Cape May Court House, New Jersey, on Sunday, October 4 from 12:00 to 4:00 pm.