Make Me a Place in Time and Seasons

Hollybush Gardens presents 'Make Me a Place in Time and Seasons', a solo exhibition by Rosemary Mayer (1943–2014), which brings together works on paper related to fabric sculptures, ephemeral installations and unrealised projects from the 1970s and early 1980s. The show also includes two related sculptures from Mayer’s ‘temporary monument’ series: Scarecrow (model) for a field (1978–79), the only extant sculpture from this period, made with fabric, wood, and ribbons, and Irises (1980–81/2025), a 'Ghost' sculpture conceived for this exhibition by the Estate of Rosemary Mayer.

 

A selection of early drawings, which Mayer began in 1971, relate to her wall-based sculptures, created by layering multiple fabrics of varying translucencies, and evince her interest in draping, knotting and tethering. Some of the drawings are ‘permanent records’ of sculptures that no longer exist, some of which Mayer had dedicated to individual women lost or forgotten throughout history, such as Hypatia (1972), a four-metre high, four-tiered curtain of cream-coloured satin, cheesecloth, rope and wire named after the fourth century NeoPlatonian mathematician and astronomer. Other drawings, such as Untitled (8.25.71), 1971, featuring draped sashes of coloured fabric with the the annotation ‘resting on two nails’, Untitled (8.27.71), 1971 and Untitled (coils), 1972 are ideas for ‘impossible knotted sewed and twisted pieces’. The drawings reveal Mayer’s desire to collapse the distinction between ornamentation and sculpture, two and three dimensions; in a statement of 1972, she writes: ‘between painting and sculpture – taking from both… interrelations – part to part, shape to shape, color to color, texture to texture, method to method, structure to structure.’