Mary Ramsden

Mary Ramsden

BornNationalityBased In
1984N/ALondon
Biography

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. Ramsden has spoken of painting as ‘thinking with the hand’, and her works bear the traces of a restless, embodied cognition. Uncertainty abides, along with persistent reaching for (hard-won) self-actualisation. The intellectual and the sensory are not so much translated as transfused into form and colour. A work’s limit conditions are defined, then tested, and sometimes extravagantly breached. Where depiction is in evidence in these paintings, it has a fugitive quality, as if Ramsden’s marks were not quite willing to be wholly subsumed into the pictorial, preferring to retain a measure of autonomy as an arrangement of pigment on a support. This is a glitch that is also a feature: a way of capturing and sequencing those concrete abstractions, time and space. ...

Selected Artworks
Through to the blue
Mary Ramsden
Through to the blue, 2021
128 x 70cm
“safe, safe, safe”
Mary Ramsden
“safe, safe, safe”, 2021
128 x 70cm
“Then fit our vision to the dark - ”
Mary Ramsden
“Then fit our vision to the dark - ”, 2022
210 x 140cm
"Here we left it"
Mary Ramsden
"Here we left it", 2021
150 x 90cm
Cartomancy
Mary Ramsden
Cartomancy, 2021
23 x 12cm
“A toucan. Maybe a wizard?”
Mary Ramsden
“A toucan. Maybe a wizard?”, 2021
33 x 25cm
Supercell
Mary Ramsden
Supercell, 2021
34 x 29cm
“Tall walk”
Mary Ramsden
“Tall walk”, 2021
23 x 30cm
well up
Mary Ramsden
well up, 2019
200 x 260cm
devil's kettle
Mary Ramsden
devil's kettle, 2019
200 x 230cm
felt
soundproofed as a dream
Mary Ramsden
soundproofed as a dream, 2022
170 x 110cm
The warmth of stones
Mary Ramsden
The warmth of stones, 2022
170 x 110cm
Small Feelings
Mary Ramsden
Small Feelings, 2023
200 x 140cm
come apart in my mouth
Mary Ramsden
come apart in my mouth, 2023
170 x 110cm
Gallery Representation
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