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In Another Weather

Melissa Cowper-Smith

This exhibit is FREE to the public and will be on display during library hours Monday--Friday 9 am-6 pm, starting Friday, September 18, 2026, through Friday, October 9, 2026.

In Another Weather by Melissa Cowper-Smith, open from September 18, 2026 through October 9, 2026.

Dates subject to change due to artist availability, please call to confirm if considering visiting toward the end of a show.

Artist Statement:

This body of work comes from years of finding my process. Each piece begins with handmade cotton paper, and materials gathered close to home — pieces of my garden, dried plants, scraps of an old summer dress, sometimes a feather or a butterfly wing — are embedded directly into the paper itself. Onto that surface I build up layers of gouache paint, pigment print, and beeswax. The brushy, dripping quality of the paint and the fine detail of the pigment prints come from very different processes, but together they read as one surface, one image — the way a memory folds separate moments into a single impression. I want these images to feel like a dream, an altered
world, seen through haze, or smoke, or a windowpane.
In Another Weather is about the way things shift. Everything changes, always — but there are moments when we feel it happening, when a place is at once familiar and already slipping out of reach, when the present starts becoming memory before we've finished living it. These paintings try to hold onto that instant: the memory of land, of place, of the gardens I've tended and the places I've traveled to and left behind.
There's something about being caught inside a moment of sunlight — light and color so vivid it hardly seems real — that I keep returning to in this work. The beauty of a plant in its season, a particular bloom, a particular hour of light. But even at their most vivid, these paintings never quite sit in the present tense. They hold that vividness and a sense of memory at the same time — as if the moment is still happening and already gone, seen and remembered in the same breath.

Artist Bio:

Melissa Cowper-Smith (b. 1979) is a painter and mixed-media artist known for evocative, layered depictions of landscape, memory, and the passage of time. Born and raised in Alberta, Canada, she received a Bachelor of Fine Art from the University of Victoria before moving to New York City in 2002 to complete a Master of Fine Art at Hunter College.
Since settling in Morrilton, Arkansas in 2011, Cowper-Smith has drawn material and inspiration from the surrounding landscape and from the eight-acre farm and garden she and her family cultivate. Nearly every piece she makes begins with handmade cotton paper, into which she embeds plants, dried flowers, and other materials gathered close to home, then builds up in layers of gouache paint, pigment print, and beeswax. Loose, gestural paint and finely detailed printed imagery come together on the page as a single surface — an approach that echoes how memory itself holds a place: vivid in fragments, hazy at the edges.
Cowper-Smith's honors include an Individual Artists Fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council, an Artists Scholarship from the Arkansas Committee of the National Museum for Women in the Arts, and an Executive Director's Scholarship from Anderson Ranch Arts Center. Her work has been exhibited at the Arkansas Arts Center and the Historic Arkansas Museum, and she is represented by M2 Gallery.

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