Mary Maclean

Phil Griffin with Andrea Stokes

  • 19th Jan - 15th Feb
  • Stephen Lawrence Gallery

This exhibition brings together photographic works made by Mary Maclean between 2000-2017. Through her finely wrought handling of the photographic medium everyday institutional and domestic architectural situations appear unfamiliar. Maclean repeatedly aligns the camera’s rectangular frame with architectural planes, fittings and fixtures cropping these to create spatial compositions that seem to occupy an indeterminate space; a space in which the image plane detaches the architecture depicted and the viewer from habitual perception’s stable ground. It is as if viewfinder and architectural frame conjoin in a choreographic process that undoes the stability of body and built environment.

Maclean was interested in the experiential – how notions of inside and outside continuously fold into and out of each other; in this exhibition spatial ambiguities oscillate within and across the works folding the architecture of the exhibition space and the viewer into the work. Some of the photographs were printed directly onto the aluminium sheet, fusing the photographic image with its support. Brush marks produced by the liquid emulsion used to sensitise the plates give the images an added effect of instability, as does their reflectivity, that draws shadow and light from the surrounding architecture into the image surface collapsing gallery space and image space into each other.

Please note: the gallery will be closed for an internal university event on Thursday 7th February

This exhibition is held in conjunction with an exhibition of Mary Maclean’s recent work: Mary Maclean: What is Seen What is Shown” at the Weston Studio Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts (until 6th February)

Exhibition curated by Phil Griffin in collaboration with Andrea Stokes

Technical support: Pippa Connolly and Ben Deakin

Text: Helen Robertson

Photography: Peter Abrahams

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