Mary Ramsden’s paintings track a ceaseless, ever-supple reckoning with her medium: its materiality and histories, its complex deals with figuration and abstraction, the points where it yields, the points where it resists. Drawing on ways of seeing that are both long-established and acutely contemporary (not least those inaugurated by new technology), there is an archaeological quality to the way she lays down, and excavates, strata of marks and pigments, buried deposits of time and space. With their audacious play of textures, surface and scale, these are paintings that insist on their own physicality, the impossibility of their reduction to mere image. Rather, like us, they belong to the world of objects, a realm of densities and depths.
Mary exhibited at the RSA for the first time as part of the last Student Exhibition in 2008 where she was awarded the RSA Sir William Gillies Bequest Award for her painting Erisian Semiotics. A year later she was part of the very first RSA New Contemporaries, convened by Will MacLean RSA, in whch her large-scale multipart work Mummerehlen received the RSA Carnegie Travelling Scholarship.
