From the 1980s, the artist lived and worked on
Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, signing and exhibiting her work under the mononym, Aldwyth. "While her meticulously assembled boxes and collages prepared from bits of cut-out art history books, encyclopedias, and other historical texts recall artists like
Joseph Cornell,
Kurt Schwitters, and
Bruce Conner, it is the subversive spirit of
Duchamp that has had the most profound impact on her work", according to Bradley Bailey. "An art historian in her own right, Aldwyth uses her vast knowledge to reframe artists in new contexts. Her collage
Document (1999-infinity) for example, offers an alternate canon of art history, revising an early edition of
H.W. Janson's undergraduate textbook mainstay
History of Art to include overlooked women artists and institutions of the past and present." Individual works are often very large and take years to complete. The collage
Casablanca (classic version), for instance, took over three years (2003-2006) and measures approximately six square feet square. It "features a large dripping orb…. the drips are composed of hundreds of staring eyeballs. Each one is the eye of an artist, culled from photographic sources: a
Chuck Close self-portrait eye, a
Lichtenstein Ben-day dotted eye, the silhouetted eyes of squadrons of artists, known and unknown", according to Oriane Stender. A major one-person exhibition organized by
Mark Sloan appeared at the
Ackland Art Museum (2009), the
Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art (2009-2010), and the
Telfair Museum of Art (2010). Its catalogue includes essays by Sloan, Rosamond Purcell, and an appendix by the artist that serves as a sort of concordance, listing, among other content, the well-over 100 artists and works whose eyes are seen in
Casablanca (classic version), as well as the contents of the 26 collaged cigar boxes that comprise
Encyclopædia (2000): found objects sorted alphabetically by box. Numerous other one-person exhibitions include ones at the Milliken Gallery, Converse College, Spartanburg, SC (1996), the Sumter County Gallery of Art (2014), 701 Center for Contemporary Art, Columbia SC (2016), the
Morris Museum of Art, Augusta (2016), and the NC State
Gregg Museum of Art & Design (2023). In addition to dozens in South Carolina and around the southeast, Aldwyth's work has appeared in group exhibitions in New York (including at Alan Stone Gallery and Francis M. Naumann Fine Art), Colorado, Connecticut, and Washington, DC. A 2021 documentary film about the artist,
Aldwyth: Fully Assembled, produced by Olympia Stone, premiered on South Carolina Public Television in March 2022. A large retrospective curated by Mark Sloan began February 2, 2023 at the Gregg Museum of Art and Design. The exhibit, titled "This is Not: Aldwyth in Retrospect" showed a spans of nearly seventy years of Aldwyth's work, beginning with photography and moving through her experimental painting, assemblage, and collage work. A catalog was published to coincide with the Exhibit, bearing the same title. "This is not: Aldwyth in Retrospect" premiered at the Gregg Museum of Art and Design, spanning from February 2 to October 7, 2023 before it moved to the
Greenville County Museum of Art from May 1, 2024 to July 28, 2024. The exhibition was on view at the Coastal Discovery Museum from October 16 to March 23, 2025. == Death ==