Raleigh-based artist Jean Gray Mohs creates abstract paintings and sculptural works in wood, metal, waxed thread, and mixed media that explore memory, adaptation, and repair through material investigation. She shares how curiosity, research, and lived experience continue to shape her evolving artistic practice.

• Jean Gray's work begins with inquiry, allowing each idea to determine the materials, techniques, and forms that best serve the work.
• Through processes of cutting, stitching, layering, and reconstruction, her paintings and sculptures examine memory, adaptation, and repair.
• As her practice continues to evolve, ArtLifting has helped connect her work with new audiences while creating space to deepen her creative practice.

Raleigh, North Carolina-based artist Jean Gray Mohs creates abstract paintings and sculptural works in wood, metal, waxed thread, paint, and mixed media that investigate what the body carries, remembers, and rebuilds. Through forms that are cut apart, stitched together, layered, and reconstructed, she examines memory, adaptation, repair, and the relationship between human strength and fragility.

Jean Gray's practice is deeply informed by her experience with chronic illness, disability, and a double lung transplant. Drawing from research into bodily systems, patterns in nature, and lived experience, she approaches each work through material investigation. Rather than illustrating those experiences directly, she allows the materials themselves to carry meaning. Maple plywood, steel, and waxed thread hold tension, support, and repair, while visible seams, layered surfaces, and the marks of the artist's hand preserve the history of each piece, reflecting an ongoing interest in how bodies and materials adapt, endure, and are rebuilt over time.

For Jean Gray, every material choice becomes part of the conversation, carrying evidence of change through its construction, surface, and history.

“I'm not trying to make perfect objects. I'm trying to make honest ones.”

What makes your creative process uniquely yours?

My creative process is rooted in inquiry and material investigation. I’m interested in how the body holds memory, disruption, adaptation, and repair, and I often approach making through a process of dismantling and rebuilding. I cut apart materials only to rejoin them. I sand, stitch, carve, bind, layer, and reconstruct surfaces until they begin to hold tension in a way that feels emotionally and physically resonant.

A lot of my work starts through research and with lived experience: bodily structures & systems, patterns in nature, even conversations around care and survival. But I don’t want the work to become illustrative. I want the materials themselves to carry meaning. Wood has memory. Thread creates tension and mending. Repetition becomes almost meditative.

The process itself mirrors the concepts I’m exploring: fragility alongside endurance, collapse alongside reconstruction. There’s a physicality to the labor that feels important to me. The work is often slow and iterative, asking me to pay close attention. In many ways, making becomes a form of care, repair, and witnessing.

What life experiences most deeply influence your work?

Living with chronic illness and disability has profoundly shaped both my life and my work. Since I was 19, I’ve had to navigate a body that can feel unpredictable,  a body that requires maintenance, intervention, rest, resilience, and trust all at once. 

Experiencing a double lung transplant shifted my understanding of the body even further: how fragile it is, how miraculous it is, and how much it can endure.

Because of that, I think a lot about vulnerability and control. What happens when the body no longer functions in the ways you expect? What does it mean to rebuild? To adapt? To carry visible and invisible histories within the body? Those questions live underneath almost everything I make.

Motherhood has also deeply influenced my perspective, the experience of caregiving, protection, exhaustion, tenderness, and interdependence. I’m interested in the often invisible infrastructures of care. Community, disability, healing, labor, and rest all weave themselves into the work, even when not directly visible.

There’s also something important to me about transformation. Taking materials apart and putting them back together again feels connected to lived experience physically and emotionally. The work becomes a way to process rupture while still allowing space for beauty, softness, and possibility.

How has sharing your work through ArtLifting changed your art or your life?

Working with ArtLifting has expanded what feels possible in my career as an artist. As artists, we wear so many hats at once, maker, administrator, shipper, communicator, marketer.  As a person with lived experience with chronic illness and disability, you wear the hats of healthy and sick and all the systems at play there. Having a team that genuinely supports both the artwork and the artist creates room to breathe differently inside the creative practice.

Their support has provided not only opportunity and visibility, but also encouragement, infrastructure, and scaffolding. For someone living with chronic illness and disability, that kind of support is incredibly meaningful. To feel seen not only for the work itself, but as a whole person navigating the realities of sustaining a creative life, carries real impact.

Sharing my work through ArtLifting has connected the work to audiences and spaces it may not have otherwise reached. It’s also reinforced something I deeply believe: that disability and illness are not limitations to meaningful creative contribution, but part of a lived perspective that can generate depth, insight, sensitivity, and connection.

There’s something powerful about being supported in a way that allows the work to deepen rather than constantly operating in survival mode.

What do you hope stays with someone after they experience your work?

I hope people leave the work feeling a little more connected: to themselves, to their bodies, and to one another. I’m interested in creating spaces that allow for pause and reflection, especially within a culture that often asks us to move quickly past discomfort, fragility, or uncertainty.

I hope the work invites people to sit with contradiction: strength existing alongside vulnerability, softness alongside tension, disruption alongside repair. Many of the forms I create appear fractured or reconstructed, but they are also carefully held together. That tension feels deeply human to me.

I want viewers to sense the labor and care embedded in the materials and process: the sanding, stitching, joining, repetition, rebuilding. There’s a tenderness in that attention. Even when the work references rupture or instability, I hope there’s also a feeling of resilience and possibility.

More than anything, I hope people recognize parts of themselves in the work. Not necessarily through a direct narrative, but through sensation or memory. If someone leaves feeling less alone in their own complexity, then the work has done something meaningful.

Jean Gray's practice has never been defined by a single material or technique. She allows each idea to determine the form it takes, with curiosity, research, and experimentation shaping every new body of work.

Through ArtLifting, Jean Gray's paintings and sculptures have found homes in workplaces and healthcare environments, including installations with BGO, CVS Health, Citizens Bank, and Orlando Health. Sharing her work through ArtLifting has expanded what feels possible in her career, providing the support and infrastructure to deepen her creative practice while connecting her work with audiences and spaces it may not have otherwise reached.

As she continues to challenge herself through new ideas, materials, and forms, Jean Gray remains committed to making work that evolves alongside her own questions and experiences.

Follow Jean Gray’s creative journey on Instagram.