Emily Gherard’s paintings have immense feeling. Using processes that inscribe and carve as well as paint, her abstract, moody paintings contain. A spirit, a feeling, a movement. Something not quite capturable, but certainly present beneath the buffed paint and etchings. During this residency at Oxbow, the 2014 Genius Award nominee will showing large-scale plaster sculptures. These pieces are composed of bricks made by pouring wet plaster into molds constructed of intaglio printing plates. A centerpiece in the show will be “Precious and Vulnerable” a boat-like structure made of 30 shaped and printed plaster blocks embedded in a wooden structure. These works incorporate Gherard’s interest in the delicate marks of etching with the weight of a hard material like plaster. by Jas Keimig