Tony Morrison – materiality as a way of triggering memory and collective memory
Self expression through material culture
Ralph Ellison – immiteriality
Materials led practice
Folds fragments surfaces, towards the poetics of cloth
Soft logic beyond constraints of binary
Mary using paper as soft, folding unfolding, soft logic and encounter
The texture of the intimate
Setting tactile against the visual
The eye does not just look but also feels
Both loose and find ourselves in Mary’s work, open ended thinking, surfaces and fragment
The surface is a liminal place
Creates imaginary worlds that can be lost in
Expansive thinking, and and rather than either or
Detritus from offset paintings she felt was more interesting than her paintings
Space and location changes her work
Currently creates life size figures
The work is disposable as a comment on how she considers African lives have been viewed as disposable in the past
Always wants to install her work as she views it as part of the process of making work
Uses gingerbread figures as a metaphor for bodies that have already been disposed of, the ingredients of ginger bread (sugar, slices etc) are related to the slave trade. Desirability and something people believe they are entitled to
Elasticity of history
The politics of paper
Scale, multiple figures, challenging the politics of the gaze
Uses e.g paper bags to reference historical social injustice e.g. the paper bag theory
The liberation of paper from an oppressive canvas
She sees her work now as ritualistic but not performative
Paper as strong and fragile
Develop relationship/bond with material that has been interacted with
Subverts European canon of art history by using her paper figures in European poses
Repetition, cyclical elements of piece
Form and content are inseparable
OSJ Wells Fine Art 