Jerwood Artists Platform   Jerwood Space London

A passage from George Perec’s book Species of Spaces and Other Places seems cogent in relationship to Maclean’s work. In this passage Perec asks, ‘What does it mean to live in a room? Is to live in a room to take possession of it? What does taking possession of a place mean?’ My answers in response to Perec’s questions are, that we live in a room through the agency of things that we ‘possessed’ earlier, and these things in turn signal our ‘possession’ of that room. We build up a personal landscape of accumulated possessions to signal our possession of that room. I will now add the question, is Mary Maclean mapping parts of those personal landscapes here, testing and assessing the durability and authority of those possessions which stand in proxy for their absent possessors? The uncertainty factor, mentioned above, seems to indicate that this relationship is in fact, very fragile. [ from catalogue essay: Roy Exley, Tableaux of empty moments, 2004 ].

Jerwood Artists Platform 20 November – 8 December 2002 Jerwood Space, London