Mary Madeleine McCarroll will perform the RHA, at the following times:
Wednesday, 27 November, 12pm-1pm
Sunday, 1 December, 2pm - 3pm
Sunday, 8 December, 2pm - 3pm
Sunday, 15 December, 2pm - 3pm
Wednesday, 18 December, 12pm-1pm
Sunday, 12 January, 2pm - 3pm
Awarded the RHA Graduate Studio Award €7,500 value
Mary graduated with a BA Honors Degree in Fine Art Media from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, in 2024. She is a multidisciplinary artist whose work interrogates themes of race, identity, and spirituality, with a current emphasis on postcolonialism and its implications for the human condition in modern society. Mary considers spirituality a potent means for both socio-cultural resistance and the preservation of cultural identity. Her visual language embraces allegory through various mediums, including installation art, photography, sculpture, and painting.
Rooted in her Irish and Bahamian heritage—two post-colonial regions—Mary Madeleine's artistic practice is shaped by observation and critical analysis of how colonial legacies influence contemporary realities. Her multimedia performance-based installation, Lost and Giddy, deep impacts of colonialism and the ensuing loss of identity. She employs blackboards as pedagogical instruments to impart indigenous African and Caribbean philosophical and spiritual teachings, subverting their traditional institutional function by elevating deeply spiritual cultures historically dismissed as primitive. The installation integrates sculptural representations evoking African traditional sculpture, emphasising the historical appropriation of sacred objects within institutional settings, displaced from their original contexts. However, her sculptures portray Douens—figures drawn from Caribbean folklore—depicted with backwards feet and disjointed bodies. These lost and giddy figures epitomise the enduring spirit of loss inflicted by colonialism.
Image: Mary Madeleine McCarroll, Blackboard 3: Unnamed Fragments from the Douendom, Image courtesy of the artist.
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