Subversive figures – Penny MacBeth
My recent work has been concerned with representing human frailty through the depiction of figurative ornaments often presented as collections or ‘crowd scenes’ to mirror the social aspects of the human condition.
As with any still life subject the objects depicted in my current series of ‘ornamental paintings’ are ‘ frozen’ in a particular moment however, the selection of figurative material gives the impression that these scenes may be pauses in a moving story the surrounding narrative of which is left to the viewers imagination. The substitution of figurines or dolls for human figures lends a whiff of the peculiar to the nearly familiar …
My preoccupation with this parallel between the fragile inanimate world of glass and china and our own fragile lives is a longstanding one as before becoming an artist I studied Materials Science at Imperial College ,London, and worked for several years as a postgraduate research scientist . Much of my work as an artist has been concerned with trying to find my own visual metaphors for our emotional lives in the physical systems which I studied then .