Selected Works – Maree Horner

Maree Horner is a New Zealand artist based in Taranaki. Most of her recent work uses the media of printmaking, painting, mixed media and digital imagery to explore the relationship between female and male through the beguiling juxtaposition of familiar objects and animals.

Selected Works at City Art brings together work from three series of Maree’s recent practice: Monumental Obsessions, Eternal Realities and Furniture of the World. While using very different media these images work from a common platform comprising familiar symbols of domesticity with their associations of nurture and femininity, be it the sofa, the bath or the old leather suitcase. Within or against these receptacles are symbols of exteriority (monuments, architectural forms) and animality (donkeys). The result is a theatrical staging of elements, disturbing and intriguing in their disruption of realist rules of volume and scale and the sense of invasion implicit in the imagery. In her Furniture of the World series Maree turns to large format digital photography to present her domestic containers within a lush, vivid, highly decorative domestic interior. Within these containers (an old leather suitcase, a hat box) is the Shakespearean “pound of flesh” – cut away bellies neatly shaped to fit their apportioned space. In these surreal still llfes Maree poses further questions of nurture (in terms of the life-giving role of the umbilical cord), here calmly yet appallingly packed away in the quotidian forms of archived memory and personal travel. As art writer and curator Bruce Phillips wrote, “These works sit on a tenuous line being both comfortably homely or horrifically debauched – a betwixt and elusive conclusion that reveals more about the animal within us and how little we understand our suppressed psyche”.