©Paula McCartney, In/Direct Alignments, Installation view, 2025

In early February 2021, we lost a bright light and singular artist, the incomparable Paula Riff. She left behind her daughter, along with an expansive community of friends, artists, and admirers, all grappling with the profound absence of her presence and vision. In 2021, in honor of Paula, Lenscratch and the Center of Photographic Art established The Paula Riff Award as a way to celebrate and extend her enduring legacy. Paula was an innovator who pushed photography beyond its conventional boundaries, using cameraless techniques and historical processes to create luminous objects of extraordinary beauty and tactility. The award recognizes artists who similarly challenge the limits of the medium through work that foregrounds the artist’s hand—whether through alternative photographic processes, cutting, sewing, weaving, sculptural intervention, or other acts of material transformation.

The Center of Photographic Art has just opened the exhibition, Changing the Narrative
The First 5 Years of Paula Riff Award Winners, featuring work by Aimee Beaubien, Minwoo Lee, Paula McCartney, Marni Myers, and Katie Shapiro. The exhibition will be on view through July 26th, 2026.

This week, we revisit the work of these five previous recipients, culminating on Friday with the announcement of the 2026 winner.

Today we feature the work of Paula McCartney. Her work was selected by gallerist Douglas Marshall, bringing together photography, ceramics, and sculpture to explore the delicate interplay between presence and absence, light and shadow, object and image. Drawing on the visual language of black-and-white analog photography, McCartney creates works in which hand-built ceramic forms converse with photographs of their shadows, collapsing distinctions between positive and negative space, past and present. Through these carefully orchestrated alignments, McCartney transforms simple geometric forms into meditations on connection, balance, and time. Rooted in both formal abstraction and the artist’s experience of motherhood, the series reflects on relationships that are at once tangible and ephemeral, revealing how light, material, and memory can hold profound emotional resonance.

©Paula McCartney, In/Direct Alignments, Installation view, 2025

My practice combines photography and ceramics to consider ways that light activates objects and environments, highlights the weight of a shadow and dialogs with my psychological experiences of being a mother. Photographs that represent a record of past accumulated experience are juxtaposed with the immediate presence of ceramic sculpture.

In/Direct Alignments pairs photographs and ceramics to explore the interconnectedness of light and shadow, presence and absence. It uses the language of black and white analog photography with its negative and positive, minimal palette and strong contrast.

The wall works juxtapose a white unglazed ceramic sculpture with a photograph of the sculpture’s shadow. The shadow in the photograph expands the form of the sculpture and holds as much presence as the sculpture itself. In the table works, a black ceramic sculpture sits on top of a photograph positioned into conversation with an image of momentary areas of sunlight from my studio windows; at times it almost feels as if the light is passing through the ceramic onto the paper, creating its own impression.

In structural and visual conversation with photograms and modernist geometric abstractions, these abstract works also express my concrete experiences as a mother, satisfying a continuous yearning for balance and connection. The photographs record a carefully composed, fleeting moment of natural light and shadow. The ceramic sculptures are deliberately placed to align and connect, cementing a peaceful existence and clear dialog that I constantly yearn for.

Remodel expresses the realistic – rather than idealistic – side of motherhood. In a set of nine photographs, each photograph records a reconstruction made from all the pieces of a broken ceramic grid. Once documented, the original pieces are piled up and used again, assembled and reassembled, creating more complex and interesting structures. I work with what I have, to create not orderly but animated results, that sometimes jut out of the frame and reach outward and onward like my son.

The four sculptural works in Remodel include ceramic structures that nod to the shape of a home. As with the reconstructions in the grid of nine photographs, the lines of the walls don’t always align and there is a visual precariousness to the structures that adds character. In contrast to the structurally rigid, machine fabricated grids of 1960-70s Conceptualism my grids are loose, playful and evidence the hand and labor of making. Each ceramic sculpture is embraced by a folded mounted photograph that records dramatic shadows of the sculpture made from multiple angles. The shadows serve as memory and evidence of my experiences through the years. – Paula McCartney

©Paula McCartney, In/Direct Alignment #13, 2025, archival pigment print, ceramic sculpture, custom wood frame, 20×16.5×5″

Paula McCartney makes photographs, books and ceramics that illustrate her collaborations with the natural world and consider ways that light activates environments and dialogs with her psychological experiences of being a mother. She has received fellowships in both Artist Books and Photography from the McKnight Foundation and grants from Women’s Studio Workshop, the Aaron Siskind Foundation and the Minnesota State Arts Board. McCartney was the 2023 recipient of the Paula Riff Award through the Center for Creative Photography

McCartney’s photographs have been exhibited nationally at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.  Her books are included in the artist book collections of the Walker Art Center, Museum of Modern Art, Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University, Getty Research Institute, among many others. She has two published monographs Bird Watching and A Field Guide to Snow and Ice. McCartney holds an MFA in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute and a certificate in Creative Studies from the International Center for Photography, NYC.

Instagram: @paula_mccartney

©Paula McCartney, In/Direct Alignment #11, 2025, side view, archival pigment print, ceramic sculpture, custom wood frame, 20x20x5″

©Paula McCartney, In/Direct Alignment #3, 2022, archival pigment print, ceramic sculpture, custom wood frame, 9x9x5″

©Paula McCartney, In/Direct Alignment #1, 2022, archival pigment print, ceramic sculpture, custom wood frame, 16×12.5×2″

©Paula McCartney, In/Direct Alignment #5, 2022, archival pigment print, ceramic sculpture, custom wood frame, 12.25 x 10.25 x 5.5″

©Paula McCartney, ReModel, Installation view, nine framed 17×17″ archival pigment prints, 2025

©Paula McCartney, ReModel, details, 17×17″ framed archival pigment prints, 2025

©Paula McCartney, ReModel #11-14, Installation view, mounted archival pigment prints, ceramic sculpture, custom wood stand, 48.5 x 17 x 12.5″ each, 2025

©Paula Mc Cartney, ReModel #11 and #12, mounted archival pigment prints, ceramic sculpture, custom wood stand, 48.5 x 17 x 12.5″ each.