Throughout her long career, Constance Mallinson has explored the tensions and interconnections between the natural and human-made world. With roots as diverse as Hieronymus Bosch, Dutch still life, Surrealism and Modernist abstraction, her most recent paintings are intricate compositions depicting quantities of post-consumer commodities intermingled with natural detritus– both collected on her daily walks through Los Angeles. Oscillating between the darkly humorous or silly and the apocalyptic, the paintings are full of contradictions: both repellent and beautiful the decaying leaves and branches have a sensual Baroque quality while the hundreds of objects represented are bright and seductive belying their status as trash.  Rendered in a near Old Master technique combined with passages of pure abstract painterly gesture, the large and small scale paintings variously suggest human faces, ocean gyres,  explosions, and trash dumps. The paintings provoke myriad questions about our attitudes towards nature and ourselves as well as the complexities and moral dilemmas of living in a techno consumerist world while simultaneously contributing to the earth’s ongoing environmental crisis.

Constance Mallinson CV

www.constancemallinson.com

“Unmade” Exhibition Catalogue

LA Times Review