Collection: LAUREL MCKENZIE - Enfolded

Laurel McKenzie engages with feminist themes in her artistic practice, particularly examining and reinterpreting the portrayal of women in historical fine art and contemporary popular media. She addresses ways in which women’s bodies are imaged, and the implications of such imagery for women and girls.

Enfolded, the installation, consists of eighteen painted panels on stretched canvas that reference fragments of classical and neo-classical marble sculptures – sculptures that portray female bodies which are at once partly concealed and revealed by drapery. This statuary, which spans a long period of western art history, conveys meaning, and no doubt meanings attached to representations of idealised, partly clothed female bodies varied over time and in different cultural contexts. Sensuality, however, is a consistent feature. The seductive beauty of skillfully carved flesh and fabric folds in such portrayals is undeniable, but so too is the reiteration of persistent imaging stereotypes.

Enfolded’s depiction of disembodied fragments of such representations of women highlight the sculptors’ direction of the viewer’s admiring eye over the partly concealed body, where both poses and enfolding drapery also (ambiguously) imply modesty and virtue. Placement of the painted fragments of draped bodies against a solid red background metaphorically situates the work in a museological context, reminiscent of the ‘salons’ of galleries of an earlier era. Re-presented this way, the details of Greco-Roman deities and allegorical figures thus celebrate the artistry of the originators, while querying conventions surrounding images of women and their bodies.