Maud Gatewood’s From the Lowgrounds (1983)—a small acrylic landscape on canvas—captures the distinctive character of her childhood home in Caswell County, North Carolina with its vivid red soil, strip farming, and propensity for snowfall. Growing up in a family deeply rooted in the land, Gatewood witnessed both the cyclical nature of rural life and the dramatic changes brought by industrialization and “Big Ag” in the mid-20th century.
Like many of Gatewood’s landscapes, From the Lowgrounds explores this tension between nature and technology. The eerie bubblegum-pink fields, collapsed perspective, and black-and-white cowhides—more pattern than form—evoke an unsettling stillness, perhaps depicting the aftermath of a clash between advancing technology and the fragility of nature. The log tobacco cabin and furrowed land, mere traces of human activity, are all that remain in this surreal landscape.
In interviews, Gatewood has described the year she created From the Lowgrounds as one that followed a personal “period of suffering about where to go next.”1Robert Hobbs, “Maud Gatewood: Re-Visions” (Greensboro, NC: Weatherspoon Art Gallery, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 1994), 30. Her art from this time reflects this uncertainty, frequently exploring themes of complexity and contradiction through works “poised on the threshold of distinctly different realities.”2Hobbs, “Maud Gatewood,” 11. In this context, From the Lowgrounds can be seen as depicting both the local landscape at a specific moment in agricultural history and, perhaps, a more timeless vision of a desolate post-human world.
The idea of hovering between realities is a powerful way to connect this work to our present moment of global conflict, political division, and looming environmental devastation. From the Lowgrounds encourages us to reflect on the possibilities ahead, urging us to consider how our choices will shape the future.
Like Gatewood’s landscape, we are teetering on the edge—and this work asks, “where do we go next?”
Footnotes
- 1Robert Hobbs, “Maud Gatewood: Re-Visions” (Greensboro, NC: Weatherspoon Art Gallery, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 1994), 30.
- 2Hobbs, “Maud Gatewood,” 11.
