Issue 47 Artist Statement
Mary Lacy
Portraiture and figurative work have always been my first love—dating back to when I began creating art as a teenager, though most of my professional life has been spent doing large-scale commercial and public art. But about five years ago, during a period of personal transition and renewed health struggles related to a past neck injury, I returned to these roots.
To understand more deeply how to portray the human figure in art, I began studying anatomy. At the same time, I was seeking to understand my own body, navigating numerous medical appointments, and supplementing these inconclusive visits with my own research. I found that I was often using the same reference images for both my art and my health. I studied bones, muscles, and connective tissues—how they moved, pulled, and twisted. The parallels between my own body and the figures I was learning to draw were astonishing.
Understanding the weight distribution of the spine, for example, was crucial in learning how to accurately depict the core shape of the body in my artwork. For my own body, everyone—myself included—had been focused entirely on my neck, but the most relief came when a craniosacral therapist began working on my pelvis. She identified stress and tightness built up in my spinal muscles, causing misalignment throughout the entirety of my spine. No work on my neck could be fully integrated without addressing the pelvis. Understanding this relationship was as crucial to my health as it was to my drawings.
More metaphorically, this work also coincided with a point in my life in which I began to reclaim a certain agency over my health and therefore body. I trusted the truth of my own symptoms and fought for better care. I felt a growing sense of agency in my own artwork, especially in the expression on the figures’ faces, including my own, when I undertook a six-foot self-portrait. Up until now, most of my work involved public and commercial art, in which I was inevitably accommodating the desires and opinions of others. This self-portrait was the first work I’d made within the privacy of a studio, with only my own vision to guide me.
The images on the front and back covers of this issue of BLR are mosaics created from broken dishes. I reached for dishes as an art-making medium because of the charge they held for me, the inherent emotionality that I was drawn to. Initially, I smashed them on the ground before further cutting them into specific shapes to use in the mosaics. I’d been recovering from a concussion at the time, and had noticed that strong emotions, especially anger, brought on the worst of my physical symptoms: migraines, panic attacks, and even UTIs. Smashing the dishes became a way to unload my nervous system.
After smashing, I would sort the shards by plate and then store them in a filing cabinet by color. I grew to appreciate the sorting process as much as the smash; the sifting was almost meditative. Eventually, I found it more practical to cut right into a plate. At first, it felt like I was cheating the process, but my needs were changing: I was making bigger mosaics, and needed more substantial pieces. I also realized that I’d largely moved through a lot of the anger and was now viewing plates differently. They held less emotional charge for me. I started to see them for their colors, patterns, and sculptural structure. I saw them for their skin tones, for their fleshiness, for the gift of words so often on the back side. I even fell in love with certain dishes, occasionally slipping them into my own kitchen.
The mosaic figures on the front and back cover of BLR are some of the very first figures that I ever created. They are based on professional models and were part of my return to figurative work, before I grew the courage to depict—and therefore look at—my own body. When I look at these mosaics now, I remember both the terrifying vulnerability and deep strength it took to begin.