Mary McFarlane
Black Box II
Rubber, silver, cotton
1998
Photography by Julia Brooke-White

Artist's Statement
Mary McFarlane's metalworks act like warnings. They are about boundaries, limits, control in both a literal sense, with their lettered messages about "Safe Sex", and in an aesthetic sense: they are stripped back, severe spare in their minimalist decor. For Mary McFarlane and Andrew Drummond both, metal is a conductor, a receptor, a symbolic mode of transmission of thoughts and feelings. Mary McFarlane's 'sculptures' are however essentially craftwork, that is they are functional, decorative, domestic objects with a symbolic veneer.

McFarlane says she started out as a painter but decided "I wanted to be making objects that you could pick up and hold. I wanted a more intimate way of responding to something than just walking into a gallery and looking".

McFarlane is a trained metalsmith. Precious metal, precious intellect: her simple shapes teem with the ideas: about design possibilities; the aesthetic satisfaction of geometrical proportions; boundaries and definitions; positive versus negative energies; issues of sexual identity.

Biography
Born Dunedin 1960.
Making jewellery since 1981. Lives in Port Chalmers 150 meters from where her grandparents arrived from Glasgow.