There is an energetic threshold of production in Jason Craighead’s studio, as the work decides its own fate. Prior to its crossing, there are no big ideas, or productivity goals, only raw materials and emotions. On the floor, several canvases lie in waiting, open to whatever the day offers. Footsteps, loose paints in flight, a stray splash of seltzer. The casual debris of living as a full-time studio artist. For Craighead, these early markings are accidental, yet welcomed events made ready for collaboration. They are the first gestures in a conversation between intention and occurrence, the unruly partnership that drives his evolving practice.

Known for large-scale paintings marked by sweeping color fields and urgent, emotional linework, Craighead arrives at his latest exhibition, A Fine State of Disrepair, extending his artistic language into assemblage. Wood pulled from the skeleton of studios past and present, fragments of plaster, found textures, and torn book pages come together as new sites of emotional reflection. He describes his latest works as a kind of emotional barometer, one that registers the maturation of a mid-career artist who has endured his share of rupture and recalibration. This new exhibition carries that tension: the willingness to let life leave its marks, and the wisdom to shape them into something resonant. What might have been resisted in his younger years becomes, now, a form of collaboration with the inevitable.

In several pieces, small gold crowns or mountain silhouettes appear near the top edges, symbols Craighead links this design to the meaning of his surname: “mountaintop,” or “top of the hill,” rooted in Scottish lineage. After three decades of making, these motifs signal a kind of arrival, an anointing of sorts, gesturing toward the summit he feels himself approaching at this moment in his life and career.

Internationally exhibited and widely recognized, this marks Craighead’s first presentation at Artspace, a timely homecoming for an artist long woven into Raleigh’s creative fabric. In this moment, as his practice shifts and expands, Craighead leans fully into the unpredictable, trusting that what occurs—whether underfoot or in the heart—can be shaped into something worth returning to.