Statement about work 2020.

Mary Trodden.

I am an artist living in Edinburgh, I make figurative paintings and drawings. The ideas that make these images often appear by accident or while I am trying to design something else.. I wondered for a long time if this meant that I wasn’t astute enough to execute my ideas accurately but I noticed that the most effective of these attempts often contained the germination of a better truth and one that I perhaps wasn’t directly responsible for.

I took up making paintings at a young age in an effort to avoid the effects of dwelling on tragedy..it was initially a means of avoidance or oblivion though after some practice I realised that it was also a transformative process..or for me anyway it altered my situation.

I’m very interested in trying to describe reality, I feel that somehow it may be more honorable to live by one’s values and scrutinising how I  perceive them..I have a job in a school which involves me teaching the methods of right brain interpretation, a system which seeks to adapt the physical and psychological means of receiving visual information.. This and learning myself about the ways in which art theory has sought to validate consciousness keeps me busy..

I was brought up under the influence of religion both of my Father who is Catholic and my Grandparents who, before they left the church were Plymouth Brethren.

Though I subsequently went on to question these aspects of governance, it bequeathed me a part in the notion of experiencing God and its beginningless tradition.

I very much admire the work of abstract 20th century mystic artists such as Paul Klee, Chagal and Kandinsky and their description of form as a psychological or spiritual condition.

 I think in my drawings I am very engaged with the aesthetic influence of early illustration and printmaking, the book of Kells, the workshops of Micheal Maier and Johann Theodore de Bry.

These Drawings are pictures of an imagined life cycle, a journey through the thresholds of birth, adolescence and maturity. I drew them freehand in quite a chaotic way on bits of found paper from my Dad’s house in Sunderland and assembled the pieces with bits of sticking tape. I then drew corresponding geometric shapes over the top of them, scanned them and digitally altered then in preparation for screen printing..

They show a woman who is working with the sea..she is making protective talismans and garments.