The Mary Paintings
Cathy Lomax
Exhibition: 6th October - 21st October 2007
Open: Thursday - Sunday, 1 - 5pm
Private View: Friday 5th October, 7 - 9pm
Artist Talk: Saturday 13th October, 6 - 8pm
Mary Bell, reproduced, preserved, forever faded in inky newsprint. A sweet little girl with Milly, Molly, Mandy 70s picture book looks. A mirror held against my childhood.
Mary, Mary, memento mori, touched and touching evil. If I paint you again and again will I learn your secrets, will I wipe out the stain? Will I learn, something of my own dark heart?
Cathy Lomax paints the same portrait of Mary Bell over and over again in a labour intensive act of non-mechanical reproduction. In re-painting this blurry newsprint cutting, as the paint catches in the murky crevices of a child’s indistinct features, she hopes something will be fathomed, something about how appearances can deceive, about how a child can kill another child, about how an image can become iconic. This questioning multiplies with the Marys and becomes not only about the authenticity of an image but also about the authenticity of painting itself as the quirks and ticks of the fallible hand make each duplicated portrait a failed copy of the previous.
Grey Area
Lower Ground Floor
31 Queens Rd
Brighton
East Sussex
BN13AD
thegreyarea@hotmail.co.uk
www.greyareagallery.org.uk
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