Mary Maclean: What is Seen, What is Shown

'Mary Maclean: What is Seen, What is Shown' was a posthumous exhibition of the work of artist Mary Maclean’s work curated by Outside Architecture with Philip Griffin. The exhibition took place at the Weston Studio Gallery at the Royal Academy. Maclean’s final work, the unfinished 'Cast' series of photographic etchings of the plaster cast reliefs once visible on the walls of the Royal Academy Schools, are the focal point of the exhibition. Before they were moved to the Royal Academy Collection store, Maclean photographed the casts in situ, intending to make a series of photo etchings from the images. The Cast photo etchings were made posthumously in 2018 in the RA Schools etching studio. The original cast reliefs are objects that were once used in drawing exercises where art students would learn to observe closely and record their observations. Universities, art schools and spaces of learning were a recurring subject in the photographic work of Maclean. In this exhibition the Cast works were brought together with a range of work of educational institutions made between 2006 – 2017. These subjects are sites that are immediately recognisable in both their specificity and their utterly codified and generic character. They are spaces that are occupied intensively and cyclically by generations of students who come and leave behind only a vague but still vital sense of their past presence. Mediated by Maclean’s photographic gaze these spaces also suggest a paradoxical temporal space: where presence of mind is irrevocably folded into escape, reverie and a mode of looking-without-seeing and fluctuating attentiveness and inattentiveness