Mary Herbert makes drawings and paintings formed of a composite of feelings, lived-sensation, unconscious processes and observation. Her current work is a series of luminous soft pastel drawings that act as windows into a dream-like realm - tapping into the power of such a space to support alternative models of thinking and perception. Spectral figures, luminescent vessels, dissolving bodies, snakes, fires, pools, moons, lakes and mountains swirl amid a haze of fragile colours. The charged atmosphere has an uncanny yet strangely familiar quality, as if each scene might somehow be anchored in another kind of deep, distant memory. Perhaps one related to Jungian ideas of a collective unconscious and shared ancestral or trans-generational parts of the psyche. In a recent interview she said ‘I think the state of dreaming goes against a lot of how we are conditioned to see things – it is a non-linear activity, linking to feminine, cyclical, spiral conceptions of time rather than a completely forward and upward progression.’
Born in Welwyn in 1988, Mary lives and works in London. She gained her BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College in 2010, and completed her Postgraduate studies at the Royal Drawing School in 2018. In 2019 she was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries. Her work has been featured in Art Maze Mag, Elephant Art, Ambit Magazine and It’s Nice That.
