Biography
Doreen Maloney is an interdisciplinary artist and Professor of Art at the University of Kentucky. Working across installation and moving-image practices, her work explores how memory, identity, and collective interior experience take spatial and time-based form. Through immersive environments and film, she examines authorship, voice, and the unseen frameworks that shape perception.
Her projects have been presented internationally in galleries, museums, and experimental venues. Drawing on a background in dance, interarts and technology, language studies, history and fine arts, her practice moves between embodied experience and mediated forms, investigating how fragile materials and contemporary technologies hold emotional resonance. She lives and works in Lexington, Kentucky.
Artist Statement
My work explores how identity, memory, and loss shape the emotional and psychological atmospheres we inhabit. Through immersive installations, and moving-image works, I use fragile materials, light, shadow, and spatial intervention to create environments that reflect the transient nature of lived experience. Drawing from personal narrative as well as collective memory, my projects often function as visual metaphors for the ways individuals carry invisible histories within everyday space.
Many of my installations are constructed from delicate, light-responsive materials such as paper, fabric, and translucent surfaces that shift as viewers move through them. These environments invite slow looking and embodied perception, encouraging viewers to become aware of breath, presence, and the subtle emotional registers that shape how we experience the world. Moving image works extend these concerns, exploring voice, absence, and the mediated conditions through which memory and communication are formed.
Recent projects, including Personal Weather, Lantern House, and Spirit House, investigate shelter, atmosphere, and the fragile architectures people construct in response to uncertainty and change. Across media, the work asks how personal experience becomes spatial or embodied, how memory becomes material, and how ephemeral forms hold emotional resonance.