Re-straining Order: The Photographs of Mary Macpherson
(This essay first appeared in the New Zealand Journal of Photography, 2006)
by Greg Donson
Re-straining Order - A curious juxtaposition of words but one that seems to fit the work of Mary Macpherson. At once a bound statement implying control and tautness, to unpick it Macpherson’s work literally re-strains the supposed order of the everyday. As though panning for imagery in a world littered with it, Macpherson’s work sieves through all this material until threads of the real and unreal knit together. At a time when photography has become bound up in technical wizardry and construction, Macpherson’s photographs follow two strands - found imagery as explored in the recent Signs of Texas series or carefully choreographed scenes overtly linked with the territories of the imagination. This article will investigate that work. More often than not Macpherson’s imagery requires the imagination of the viewer to fill in the gaps, pull the thread and decipher the scene.
Your Mouth was stained with sun …………Janet Frame from the poem Summer1
White Thread and At Sea are two such series stained with colour. White Thread takes items of white clothing and juxtaposes them with language. Clothes for Macpherson can be metaphors for objects of desire, extremes of emotion. One image shows a crisp white shirt with a list of doom laden 'D' words hung around the neckless collar - dishonour, despair, disgrace, death - the anchor of language. A wedding dress hanging limbless, a sad white trophy - a potent symbol of a day, a life changed for better or worse. Another white shirt is uncomfortably tied to a chair and shrugging. Made after Macpherson attended a job interview, the roped-in shirt evokes a job candidate's sense of expectation - trying to make a good impression but bound by unease and anticipation. The regulation white shirt becomes laden with self doubt[;] clothes maketh the man and white thread nods to this.
At Sea, a more recent body of work explores the sea, as if Kelly Tarlton’s Underwater World, Moby Dick and Spongebob Squarepants had all come together in a cacophony of watery wit. Macpherson began this series with thoughts of the sea and all that it encompasses, what it means in peoples lives and blue as a metaphor for the unconscious. The images use found objects collected from tourist gift shops and place them on and underneath an ocean of blue lace and plastic. Again as in White Thread, there are elements of being bound, one image bares a diagonal cross, as though to suggest tilted lines of latitude and longitude bringing sites and spectators together. Lines traced on a map, journeys pushing people apart and together.
There always seems to be a duality of readings in the images: they can either be read as elements of restraint or elements of freedom. As though testing the viewers ability to see a glass half full or half empty, a plastic shark can either be seen as trapped in a lacy net or free in an ocean of blue. At Sea engages the viewer with recognisable trinkets, but a healthy dose of imagination further activates these inanimate objects.
The series Partial View mediates the natural world through the built one, a veiled view through the net curtained window of a Wairarapa farmhouse. A tree is divided by a blue line created by panes of glass meeting - a watery spirit level, as though we or the tree are shortly about to drown, the blue line taut across the image. Macpherson hunts out images where nature is viewed through a filter; this process of filtering nature is one that has preoccupied the artist’s work.
Nature appears in the Fabrication series as the thin oak veneer of a deco wardrobe door and the blue and white wallpaper sporting an all over floral motif. 'Natural’ materials or motifs have now become so mediated through processes of production and reproduction that the raw material is light years away. We surround ourselves by material forms which communicate to us what we need. This is a nod to natural elements in the home - a wall covered in paper sporting a plant motif, a wardrobe made from oak - but in actual fact there is nothing natural about these items. As Lucy Alcock puts it in her 1990 essay Tilting at Nature “Nature is a construction of ideas inherited from literature, from histories, from the media, from metaphor”.2
Another image from this series shows a calendar featuring native birds and plants and photographed as though Macpherson has stumbled across this unlikely object in the undergrowth. A sense of anticipated decay is present, creased from perhaps being folded in a drawer and a shadow of a branch overlaid. Soon the weather will change, it will be crumpled by a sleeping cat. Macpherson said in an artist statement, “I love the disturbance, humour, beauty and ugliness which occurs when human beings attempt to live on their planet.”3
The complexity of our place in the world and how we interact with language, objects and imagery is further investigated in the Safe series where Macpherson juxtaposes text alongside constructed scenes, inspired by the supposed permanence of billboard advertising. Describing this series as a kind of sequence of anti-adverts, Macpherson again re-strains material, this time through elements of advertising, pairing them with found objects, creating unlikely bedfellows.
An image that has always perplexed me from this series is of a lolly pink dress and a mop alongside the repeated word 'pure'. It turns out to be not a careful musing of the word but the amount of times the word 'pure' appeared on the back of a bottle of New Zealand water, a found poem amongst the detritus of advertising jargon. Macpherson at once seems to admire the rhythm and the look of the word 'pure' on the page but is also playing with the word and all its associations.
The element of play or an unlikely scenario can be seen in another image from the same series where a gorse branch is placed upon a Persian rug and accompanied with the sentence “time and encroaching development” . Not only is this branch an unwelcome intruder but it is a piece of nature of the most deviant kind - an introduced pest, which incidentally also grows in the rocky bank at the back of Macpherson’s Wellington home. One has to ask how did it come to be on the rug, a little piece of wickedness in the home - is it there as a test of endurance to see how long the viewer can go before mentally clearing away the mess?
This series ends with a bright orange Flymo on a background of grass, a piece of machinery designed to control the domesticated nature surrounding our homes. That Macpherson chooses a Flymo - a lawnmower whose workings are a mystery, rather than a regular mower with wheels - only accentuates the oddness of the lengths to which we strive to achieve order over the chaos of nature.
By placing objects in unlikely places Macpherson appears to be playing with the thin line between order and disorder. The quiet and intimate nature of the imagery and accompanying text of this series ensures that the viewer cannot help but to engage closely with the image. In his recent publication The Architecture of Happiness the philosopher Alain de Botton comments on the ability of details to spark a series of associations. “That we can now retrieve that half forgotten detail and apply it ….is testament to the synaptic process by which our subconscious can master information and make connections that our conscious selves may be wholly incapable of articulating”.4
Although Macpherson’s body of work may appear as though it has been produced in rapid succession, with each series being a concentrated process, most have lingered in the artist's memory and have been returned to over time, a process by which the construction of one series of images only serves to trigger the next. Each series is indicative of a journey; in the artist’s own words from Road poem: “The journey accumulates inside us until we are incoherent with trees and paddocks and cars”.5
Mary Macpherson’s photographs evoke journeys into territories of wonder and imagination.
Greg Donson is curator and Public Programmes manager at the Sarjeant Gallery, Wanganui.
Notes
1. Frame, Janet, Summer, from The Pocket Mirror, p 37, Vintage, 1992
2. Alcock, Lucy, Tilting at nature , p 3, Dowse Art Museum, 1990
3. Macpherson, Mary, Urban Landscapes, artist statement, 1987
4. de Botton, Alain, The Architecture of Happiness, p 89, Hamish Hamilton an imprint of Penguin Books, 2006
5. Macpherson, Mary, Road poem, from Millionaire’s Shortbread, p 61, University of Otago Press, 2003
(This essay first appeared in the New Zealand Journal of Photography, 2006)
by Greg Donson
Re-straining Order - A curious juxtaposition of words but one that seems to fit the work of Mary Macpherson. At once a bound statement implying control and tautness, to unpick it Macpherson’s work literally re-strains the supposed order of the everyday. As though panning for imagery in a world littered with it, Macpherson’s work sieves through all this material until threads of the real and unreal knit together. At a time when photography has become bound up in technical wizardry and construction, Macpherson’s photographs follow two strands - found imagery as explored in the recent Signs of Texas series or carefully choreographed scenes overtly linked with the territories of the imagination. This article will investigate that work. More often than not Macpherson’s imagery requires the imagination of the viewer to fill in the gaps, pull the thread and decipher the scene.
Your Mouth was stained with sun …………Janet Frame from the poem Summer1
White Thread and At Sea are two such series stained with colour. White Thread takes items of white clothing and juxtaposes them with language. Clothes for Macpherson can be metaphors for objects of desire, extremes of emotion. One image shows a crisp white shirt with a list of doom laden 'D' words hung around the neckless collar - dishonour, despair, disgrace, death - the anchor of language. A wedding dress hanging limbless, a sad white trophy - a potent symbol of a day, a life changed for better or worse. Another white shirt is uncomfortably tied to a chair and shrugging. Made after Macpherson attended a job interview, the roped-in shirt evokes a job candidate's sense of expectation - trying to make a good impression but bound by unease and anticipation. The regulation white shirt becomes laden with self doubt[;] clothes maketh the man and white thread nods to this.
At Sea, a more recent body of work explores the sea, as if Kelly Tarlton’s Underwater World, Moby Dick and Spongebob Squarepants had all come together in a cacophony of watery wit. Macpherson began this series with thoughts of the sea and all that it encompasses, what it means in peoples lives and blue as a metaphor for the unconscious. The images use found objects collected from tourist gift shops and place them on and underneath an ocean of blue lace and plastic. Again as in White Thread, there are elements of being bound, one image bares a diagonal cross, as though to suggest tilted lines of latitude and longitude bringing sites and spectators together. Lines traced on a map, journeys pushing people apart and together.
There always seems to be a duality of readings in the images: they can either be read as elements of restraint or elements of freedom. As though testing the viewers ability to see a glass half full or half empty, a plastic shark can either be seen as trapped in a lacy net or free in an ocean of blue. At Sea engages the viewer with recognisable trinkets, but a healthy dose of imagination further activates these inanimate objects.
The series Partial View mediates the natural world through the built one, a veiled view through the net curtained window of a Wairarapa farmhouse. A tree is divided by a blue line created by panes of glass meeting - a watery spirit level, as though we or the tree are shortly about to drown, the blue line taut across the image. Macpherson hunts out images where nature is viewed through a filter; this process of filtering nature is one that has preoccupied the artist’s work.
Nature appears in the Fabrication series as the thin oak veneer of a deco wardrobe door and the blue and white wallpaper sporting an all over floral motif. 'Natural’ materials or motifs have now become so mediated through processes of production and reproduction that the raw material is light years away. We surround ourselves by material forms which communicate to us what we need. This is a nod to natural elements in the home - a wall covered in paper sporting a plant motif, a wardrobe made from oak - but in actual fact there is nothing natural about these items. As Lucy Alcock puts it in her 1990 essay Tilting at Nature “Nature is a construction of ideas inherited from literature, from histories, from the media, from metaphor”.2
Another image from this series shows a calendar featuring native birds and plants and photographed as though Macpherson has stumbled across this unlikely object in the undergrowth. A sense of anticipated decay is present, creased from perhaps being folded in a drawer and a shadow of a branch overlaid. Soon the weather will change, it will be crumpled by a sleeping cat. Macpherson said in an artist statement, “I love the disturbance, humour, beauty and ugliness which occurs when human beings attempt to live on their planet.”3
The complexity of our place in the world and how we interact with language, objects and imagery is further investigated in the Safe series where Macpherson juxtaposes text alongside constructed scenes, inspired by the supposed permanence of billboard advertising. Describing this series as a kind of sequence of anti-adverts, Macpherson again re-strains material, this time through elements of advertising, pairing them with found objects, creating unlikely bedfellows.
An image that has always perplexed me from this series is of a lolly pink dress and a mop alongside the repeated word 'pure'. It turns out to be not a careful musing of the word but the amount of times the word 'pure' appeared on the back of a bottle of New Zealand water, a found poem amongst the detritus of advertising jargon. Macpherson at once seems to admire the rhythm and the look of the word 'pure' on the page but is also playing with the word and all its associations.
The element of play or an unlikely scenario can be seen in another image from the same series where a gorse branch is placed upon a Persian rug and accompanied with the sentence “time and encroaching development” . Not only is this branch an unwelcome intruder but it is a piece of nature of the most deviant kind - an introduced pest, which incidentally also grows in the rocky bank at the back of Macpherson’s Wellington home. One has to ask how did it come to be on the rug, a little piece of wickedness in the home - is it there as a test of endurance to see how long the viewer can go before mentally clearing away the mess?
This series ends with a bright orange Flymo on a background of grass, a piece of machinery designed to control the domesticated nature surrounding our homes. That Macpherson chooses a Flymo - a lawnmower whose workings are a mystery, rather than a regular mower with wheels - only accentuates the oddness of the lengths to which we strive to achieve order over the chaos of nature.
By placing objects in unlikely places Macpherson appears to be playing with the thin line between order and disorder. The quiet and intimate nature of the imagery and accompanying text of this series ensures that the viewer cannot help but to engage closely with the image. In his recent publication The Architecture of Happiness the philosopher Alain de Botton comments on the ability of details to spark a series of associations. “That we can now retrieve that half forgotten detail and apply it ….is testament to the synaptic process by which our subconscious can master information and make connections that our conscious selves may be wholly incapable of articulating”.4
Although Macpherson’s body of work may appear as though it has been produced in rapid succession, with each series being a concentrated process, most have lingered in the artist's memory and have been returned to over time, a process by which the construction of one series of images only serves to trigger the next. Each series is indicative of a journey; in the artist’s own words from Road poem: “The journey accumulates inside us until we are incoherent with trees and paddocks and cars”.5
Mary Macpherson’s photographs evoke journeys into territories of wonder and imagination.
Greg Donson is curator and Public Programmes manager at the Sarjeant Gallery, Wanganui.
Notes
1. Frame, Janet, Summer, from The Pocket Mirror, p 37, Vintage, 1992
2. Alcock, Lucy, Tilting at nature , p 3, Dowse Art Museum, 1990
3. Macpherson, Mary, Urban Landscapes, artist statement, 1987
4. de Botton, Alain, The Architecture of Happiness, p 89, Hamish Hamilton an imprint of Penguin Books, 2006
5. Macpherson, Mary, Road poem, from Millionaire’s Shortbread, p 61, University of Otago Press, 2003
