Mary Maclean
What is Seen, What is Shown
29 November 2018 - 6 February 2019
Weston Studio, RA Schools
Daily 10am – 6pm
Friday 10am – 10pm
Free, no booking required.
See a collection of photographic works by former Senior Lecturer at the RA Schools, Mary Maclean. Each work in the exhibition is a meditation on the act of looking and on the way objects and spaces shape that process.
Universities, art schools and spaces of learning were a recurring subject for Mary Maclean (1962 – 2018), a Senior Lecturer at the RA Schools. Maclean approached her subjects with a meticulous objectivity, but the resultant works bring to light a less tangible quality. She discovers this in the least likely of places and often in areas she referred to as the “away from the centre” – things at the periphery of vision.
In her final work, the Cast series of 2017, Maclean turned her attention to objects that were intended to be scrutinised closely. These ornamental forms, once used as part of an art student’s training, lay hidden behind stud walls in the RA Schools. The techniques of observing and close attention alluded to are singular in these works, but the drive to allow objects to reveal both their seen and unseen depths is unswerving.
Daily 10am – 6pm
Friday 10am – 10pm
Free, no booking required.
Image gallery
Campus #1, 2011
Cast #3, 2017 (printed 2018)
Cast #2, 2017 (printed 2018)
Wall #6, 2015
