Mary Stack
For Sydney-based painter Mary Stack, the domestic realm becomes a space for formal experimentation. In her ongoing Unfolded Linen on Linen series, she continues her investigation into the visual potential of the everyday—handkerchiefs, tea towels, the folds and creases of cloth. “Everyday items like handkerchiefs and tea towels felt like a familiar starting point,” she says. “By isolating these objects from their usual surroundings, my aim is to keep the interpretation open.” Though the subject matter may appear humble, Stack’s intellectual foundations are deeply rooted in art history.
Stack’s process is as meticulous as it is intuitive. She begins by photographing the linen, then developing those images through drawings and watercolour studies before committing to the final painting. Each work is built up slowly in translucent layers of oil paint, with areas rubbed back to reveal texture and allow the image to emerge gradually. “There’s something poetic about painting linen on linen,” she reflects. “It becomes a kind of double surface.”
This material mirroring nods to the tradition of trompe l’oeil, but Stack enjoys subverting that genre by shifting scale and context. “Unlike traditional trompe l’oeil, which typically replicates objects at their actual size, I enjoy changing the scale—making something small feel monumental.” The result is a kind of visual play that draws attention to the act of perception itself, as much as to the object being represented. “It’s slow work,” she admits, “but that slowness matters.”
Tea towels reappear throughout the body of work, familiar forms that she neither sentimentalizes nor seeks to elevate. “I’m not after nostalgia exactly, but I know that people project meaning onto these objects. That’s part of what makes them so interesting.” Of Untitled (unfolded tea towel, yellow stripes), she simply says, “The colour feels joyful. And sometimes, that’s enough of a reason.” While there’s no overt narrative threading the series together, there is a consistent undercurrent—a quiet attention to transformation. “These fabrics have been touched, folded, used. And now they’re painted, suspended. There’s something in that transformation that I keep coming back to.”
