• Painting

The Rules of The Game

Mary Kervick

The themes researched in my work focus on the classification and categorisation of individuals. The work explores how grouping individuals together creates a sense of order in how people experience the world from political, social, and power perspectives. This year, through life-sized monochromatic oil depictions of sporting figures and installations of 'unit form' canvas structures on a football pitch, I have focused on the game as a signifier for systems of order and categorization.

Within my work I created 'rules' for painting, resulting in a series with subtle differences or disconnects between individual works, ultimately slowing down the looking process. Like the work of Maggie Nelson whose writing highlights the complexity of delineation; the point of which is to delay premature resolution and highlight nuances within structures of order.