fleshings
Although primarily a painter, for several years Hobart-based Mary Scott has been working with digital prints and exploring how identity can be determined by social expectations and standards. Scott’s digital prints are dark and moody, favouring anonymous bodies and shadowy interiors: sharp lines of starched ribbons contrast with lush billows of fabric concealing and revealing the bodily frame, seducing the eye with a playful yet disconcerting façade. Fleshings represents Scott’s return to painting and a much lighter palette.
In Fleshings, Scott configures her compositions meticulously. Figures possess a pert sensuality while softly lit domestic interiors are sliced into fragments. Imprinted onto the gallery wall is a quote, ‘the house felt more like a body—softer, more mortal and more organic than a building’, which immediately provides an interpretative springboard for the viewer. Without the aid of titles, Scott’s large body of work consists of neat snapshots, intimate views of domestic space and the figures inhabiting them.
Initially, the works in Fleshings appear serenely hazy. Yet with deeper contemplation, the images convey a gilded menace which hovers tensely beneath their muted pastel surfaces. Furniture has been placed askew and figures drift between rooms. Something is not right. Faces gaze out into an unknown pictorial plane, hinting at uncertain possibility. A hint of impending violence lurks within Scott’s idealised feminine environment and conjures a frustrated desire to break away from the confines of this impeccably controlled interior space.
Scott paints the firm flesh of primly dressed adolescent girls as though it is coated in a waxy candy glaze. Their postures and expressions appear more like those of a coveted porcelain doll than a female on the cusp of womanhood. Capturing the awkwardness created