About the Artist

Cassidy works in encaustic, a medium made up of damar resin, beeswax, and color pigment that only takes shape under heat. Working over several heated palettes, she builds her surfaces slowly, layer over layer, warming and working the wax-based medium until the texture turns into something you want to touch as much as look at. The process is part control and part surrender and what rises out of it is pure chance.

Cassidy has been making art for as long as she can remember, winning her first school-wide art contest in the third grade. At age ten, she began a formal study in charcoal and pastel under Ewa Pohl, a Polish-American muralist. In the years that followed she moved through nearly every medium she could find, pencil, oil, acrylic, screen printing, collage, and pottery, including advanced coursework at the historic Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, Virginia. She later went on to study oil and gouache under contemporary artist and illustrator Nataliya Gershman.

In 2018, while living in Seattle, she converted her one-bedroom apartment into a working studio. It was there, at the height of COVID, that she began apprenticing under Laura Van Horne of Gray Sky Gallery. It was Laura who introduced her to encaustics and changed the direction of her work for good.

Now based in Charlotte, North Carolina, her work can be found at Queen City Art Gallery, a nonprofit gallery supporting the local artist community.