Mary Reardon  

Mary Reardon describes her work:

          " My work concerns itself with the human need to resolve the duality of existence – the search for the soul within the physical mind.  The sum of our memories is the essence of our souls, or who we are as individuals, and yet the process of memory is invisible to us.  I attempt, through my paintings, to describe how that process of remembering and forgetting looks.

            In order to effect this description, I have turned to one of the traditions of the still life – the use of objects as symbols.  The bird has been used, throughout the history of the visual arts, to represent the human soul.  Following in this tradition, I use the feather to represent the human soul or, in psychological terms, our memories.  The containers, nests, and branches I have depicted are meant to represent the physical mind and how it functions as it holds, or fails to hold, those memories. 

            The viewer, once aware of the symbolism of the objects can, in effect, read my still-lifes as lines of text that describe how the mind looks at the moment when something is remembered or forgotten.  Indeed, I often use an object such as a red marble to cause the viewer’s eye to pause – the equivalent of punctuation. 

            Most recently, I have added sky and clouds as a new setting for my still-lifes as a further way to suggest a particular state of mind.  This reference to the out-of-doors prompted me to title the works “Memory Landscapes”.  In the smaller works the “landscape” is sometimes simply alluded to with the use of an object such as a twig or a leafing branch. 

            Beyond this use of symbolism, I believe that my work can also be enjoyed by the viewer who, unaware of the visual metaphor I have created, is simply responding to the colour, shape, and spacing of the objects rendered.