Scene at Edfu and other sculptures

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery is delighted to present new works by Linda Marrinon in Scene from Edfu and other sculptures. Emerging in the 1980's, Marrinon's work is informed by an interest in feminism, architecture and art history. Often displaying a keen sense of humour, her modestly scaled figures and busts draw on techniques associated with 19th century figurative sculpture. Marrinon's statuaries and plaster tableaux portray historical figures and archetypes drawn from the fathomless archive of our times. Considering the span of Marrinon's subject matter, time is a condition with which the sculptor freely plays.

Executed in plaster and terracotta, coloured in delicate pastel tones and intimate in scale, these new works reveal the sensibility and touch of the Melbourne sculptor. At once playful and grave, the works utilise a wide range of media. Woman with a white dog (2020) appears entirely made of white cotton wool. Woman in a forest (2020) wears a cloche hat from the 1920s and is draped in a hessian shawl covered in leaves. Woman with fan (2020) seems to have stepped out of a Fragonard while master French couturier Paul Poiret appears in costume for a fancy-dress party in 1914. And the sombre, black figure of a young Australian dressed in the “military” style of the First World War years, enlivened with gold buttons, turning thoughtfully away from two children playing, represents a proposed monument to the experience of those left at home, waiting during wartime. Marrinon’s works are often a meditation on character and the human condition; an invitation for introspection. Armed with technical brilliance, Marrinon is free to indulge in idiosyncratic proportions and the pleasures of the handmade.

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Linda Marrinon's work is represented in major state and national public collections, and university, corporate and private collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Australian National University, Canberra; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. In 2018 Marrinon was awarded the prestigious Don Macfarlane Prize, an award to be given annually to a senior Australian artist, in recognition of their unwavering, agenda-setting arts practice and ongoing contribution to Australian art.