Mary Woods

My practice is a multi-media one, incorporating sculpture, installation, photography, drawing and painting. I borrow from the logics of printmaking, which complicate the understanding of an original or singular piece of work, and understand my practice as iterative and machinic. I am interested in the movement of data and images online, and the social and psychological dimension of communication – when to speak, when not to speak and whose speech is valued. The dialectic between expression and silence, desire and suppression, gives motion to my work. I use visual languages of fragmentation and alienated body parts to visualise the means by which our desires become tokenized and abstracted into currency, as well as diagrammatic forms to highlight the contrast between emotional experience and the orders or narratives we use to represent it. I contrast the softness of graphite with industrial materials such as concrete and steel in order to visualise the systems which seek to universalise, order, and commodify the most intimate parts of our beings, questioning the tacit idea that art must be vulnerable and expressive. I do not aim to create a new language or system of representation, but assemblages that remain in motion, changing as each new viewer comes to them and the environment they exist in evolves.

Seen against the sea, she’s pink like the inside of a seashell. The speed of her rippling hair breaks her face into frames, and in each one a different girl is captured then released.
Seen against the motorway, she’s silver. A sea of metal rumbles beneath her. There are so many shining surfaces on a footbridge over the motorway, concrete dripping rainwater, rivulets of light on windshields. Albertine is one shining surface among others, and when she falls, she enfolds her shattered phone screen and the scuffed frame of her bike. But Albertine doesn’t shatter or scuff, she bleeds like a girl.
The accident happens as fast as everything else on the M8, as fast as history hurting towards rubble, as fast as a new girl springs up from the wreckage.
Passers by gather to watch, and someone takes a picture.
Every iteration entails a breakage. All girls are disposable. Beneath the smooth blur, artificially generated consistency, static hisses and spits. This version of Albertine is happy to pass on the baton. There can be no retirement, no afterlife of the young girl, but nothingness is its own relief.