Carrie Haddad Gallery is pleased to present its fall group exhibition, Fertile ground, featuring six artists whose work explores the cyclical rhythms of the natural world and the tactile magic of material exploration.

Dora Somosi, Allyson Levy, Annika Tucksmith, Betsy Weis, Lily Morris, and Eileen Murphy work across photography, painting, encaustic, and mixed media to explore growth, transformation, and time through distinct approaches to the natural world. Plants, weather, threads, shadows, and tangled forms recur throughout the exhibition and mirror the rhythmic gesture of their practices. The title evokes the fertile darkness of night and the luminous energy of day, creating a space of perpetual cycles where the cosmic and the earthly mingle. It conjures a visual spell that draws these realms together, inviting us to sense the rhythms of the celestial within the intimate and tangible world.

Dora Somosi explores time and transformation by merging multiple views of a single location into dreamlike photographic compositions. Refracted light, enlarged botanical forms, and layered imagery make subtle processes of growth visible, while also reflecting on metamorphosis as it relates to the body and the passage of generations. Somosi further pushes the boundaries of photography through repurposed test prints and embroidery, using thread toned with organic materials from the landscapes depicted.

Somosi is a Hungarian-American artist living and working in Brooklyn and upstate New York. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at Klompching Gallery, the International Center of Photography, and the Penumbra Foundation, and her photographs have appeared in The New York times, The Atlantic, and T magazine.

Allyson Levy draws directly from the seeds, flowers, and leaves cultivated at Hortus Arboretum and Botanic Garden, which she founded nearly 25 years ago with her husband in Stone Ridge, NY. She encases plant matter in wax, preserving it as a kind of ex-situ seed library. Her compositions are also informed by textiles and beadwork, with organic materials arranged into rhythmic patterns that explore preservation, botanical life, and the generative potential of the earth.

Levy's visual art practice is closely connected to her work as a gardener, collector, and steward of the natural world. In addition to maintaining her arboretum and artistic practice, Allyson has also published an acclaimed book Cold hardy fruits and nuts with her husband, Scott. The gallery has proudly exhibited her work for more than 20 years.

Lily Morris explores entanglement through twisted threads, ropes, branching forms, and other structures that evoke both human technologies and biological systems. Her work connects the nervous system, veins, hair, and roots to histories of labor, making, and the transmission of knowledge. Her compositions integrate unconventional materials – hornet’s nest paper, snakeskin, shells, sand – with the painted illusion in ancient pigments; when combined, the final works function as both personal and spiritual artifacts.

Born on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, Morris is a painter and interdisciplinary artist based in New York's Hudson Valley. She received her BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and her MFA from the University at Albany in 2026 and was a resident at the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Eileen Murphy’s newest paintings “explore bodies of water as a space of psychological and metaphysical reflection, rather than geographic description”. The small-scale, exquisitely painted works on panel appeal to an emotional sensibility versus guiding observations to a physical place. Murphy harnesses the powerful effects of color and diffused light to contemplate the “threshold between presence and disappearance – a place where perception becomes unstable and memory beings to dissolve into atmosphere.”

Murphy was born and raised in the Hudson Valley and has divided her time between here and Brooklyn for the past two decades. After receiving her MFA from Pratt Institute, Murphy went on to attend residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Yaddo, and High Line 9, and received the Individual Artist Award from the Santo Foundation in 2017. She was the Lead Faculty in Drawing, Painting, and Printmaking in the MFA program at the Institute of Art and Design at New England College from 2020-2023. Recent exhibits were at Gallery Afternoon in Seoul, South Korea and Thomas VanDyke Gallery in Brooklyn, NY.

Betsy Weis photographs trees, grass, dirt, mountains, water, sky, and weather, approaching nature as both resilient and fragile. Her primarily black and white photographs draw particular attention to darkness, abstraction, geometry, and the structures embedded within the landscape. Weather is central to her practice as a marker of change and uncertainty, while dark spaces invite closer attention to what might exist beyond immediate view. Weis’ ability to capture texture and movement in her photographed compositions is unparalleled.

Weis holds an MFA in Painting from New York University and a BFA in Textiles from California College of Arts and Crafts. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and institutions in New York and internationally.

Annika Tucksmith's surrealistic paintings transform the Hudson Valley landscape into strange and psychologically charged narratives. Raised in Chatham, NY, she draws from the rural environment she grew up in, exploring the point where a familiar place begins to feel unknown. Elements of imposing danger through motifs of fire, impending storms, twisted trees, and lonesome figures portrayed with accents of neon express a skeptical outlook of our present and future.

Tucksmith has exhibited throughout the Northeast, including at Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson and the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield. She is the recipient of an Elizabeth Greenshields Grant and the Jacques Parker and Marie Deguard Arts Scholarship and recently completed an MFA at Columbia University. Tucksmith is also the Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Connecticut College.