Viewing Room: Mary Macken Allen, Strange Dwellings

About

Strange Dwellings brings together a recent body of paintings by Mary Macken Allen which touch upon ideas of the domestic through painterly figuration. Often working from a combination of photographs, film stills and images from interior decorating magazines, the paintings combine flat, blank objects with sensitively painted figures that drift in and out of their environment. At once strange and familiar, this environment too has an unsteady feeling - alternately protecting and infecting the characters that inhabit it. Anonymous hands reach out, but whether it’s to comfort or to haunt is unclear. Here, the mundane and the surreal are interwoven - evoking a mysterious and dreamlike world where nothing is quite as it seems. 

Mary Macken Allen graduated with a BA in Fine Art: Painting from Wimbledon College of Art in 2015. In the same year she was awarded a six month residency at Husk Coffee and Creative Space, where she held her first solo show in 2016. She has exhibited in such group shows as A Perspective on Female Portraiture, The Old Post Office, 2014; Modern Discomfort, Stour Space, 2018; and I see myself there where I am not, Safehouse, 2018. Mary Macken Allen is based in Unit 8, Studio TB-256. For more on Mary's work visit marymackenallen.co.uk