come before her and present a stark and singular vision of the province’s vast and untamed wilderness devoid of romance or the near-spiritual depictions of landscape we’ve seen from her predecessors. However, if her new exhibition The Borrowing Days—showing at Christina Parker Gallery in St. John’s until August 1, 2026—is any indication, there has come a shift in Greeley’s conceptual and formal preoccupations: a quieter yet no less elegant exploration of change and permanence themselves. 

For any working artist, commercial and critical success of the sort Greeley received when she burst onto the local and national scene is something of a double-edged sword. You begin to show your work in public and private galleries. And people want to buy it. Some doofus writes a glowing review, or several. Big public institutions start to collect you. But after a while—I can only assume—it’s like you’re on a kind of treadmill, and you begin to hear the distant tolling of some enormous brass bell: Give me the same thing, it seems to say, only different, and you begin to suspect you inhabit a cage of your own making, your own success.

Luckily for us all, a recent residency at Artlink in County Donegal in Ireland has allowed Greeley to take stock of where she’s been and how she got there artistically, and the results shown in The Borrowing Days represent—while not quite a complete exploding of her previous practice—a significant change in her artistic concerns. Inspired partially by the remnant ceramic chimneys of abandoned and crumbling buildings around Artlink—overgrown with creepers and thorns—and partially by certain folk-beliefs and mythology of the inhabitants of said buildings who sought good fortune and safety in what seemed a threatening and unpredictable world, this new body of work runs the gamut of mediums and materials: painting, ceramic sculpture, photography, video, screen-printing, and serigraphy.

Greeley’s Sea Bricks—a collection of painted wax sculptures cast from the worn-down and eroded remnants of ceramic chimney bricks the artist found in the tide-pools and coastlines of Donegal—recall not only the hearth at the heart of the family home with its warmth and safety and potential nourishment, but also the concept of entropy: the gradual giving away of order into disorder. The eventual, inevitable erosion of permanence, be it the literal permanence of a built environment, the natural environment vis-à-vis climate change, one’s society as regards displacement and resettlement, one’s art practice, or indeed, one’s own identity itself. Carved through years of water and wind, these wax casts of ceramic brick execute a kind of artistic sleight-of-hand: camouflaged, painted to look like brick, the irregularly shaped stones in imitation of the real deal that inspired their creation. Is it that our identity then, our own mythologizing of ourselves, Greeley seems to ask, is likewise merely a facsimile of a deeper or more true essential quality? Given the chaos and brutality of the world, is artistic inquiry really a legitimate response? Or is it, like the Donegal families who put shoes in the chimneys of their homes to ward off bad luck, illness, and evil spirits, merely a comforting act of faith and superstition? 

Whatever the case may be, The Borrowing Days is not to be missed—it’ll be gone before you know it.

Craig Francis Power is an artist and writer from St. John’s, Newfoundland (Ktaqmkuk). Total Party Kill, his collection of poetry exploring addiction and sobriety through the imagery of Dungeons & Dragons, was published by Breakwater Books in 2024.