Mary O’Malley‘s recent ceramic work appears as a dining set salvaged from wreckage scattered along the seafloor. In her current show at Arch Enemy Arts, “A Seat at the Table,” her work is presented as a full-room installation in which a dining service is set. At the artist’s hands, porcelain, glaze, and gold become a convincing display of the organic overtaking high-class artifacts.
“A Seat at the Table showcases Mary’s current draw to seventeenth to nineteenth century European porcelain and applied art, relics from a time of mass global cultural exchange,” the gallery says. “With the current global conversation regarding immigration, Mary explores the juxtaposition between the past’s celebration of the exotic and today’s closed borders and xenophobic hate speak. In creating contemporary decorative objects, she explores subversively and through allegory, narratives which discuss the banal essence of pretty things, and the heavy historical contexts from which they originate.”
The show runs through Nov. 24. See more of her recent work below.
