Deborah Marks

Posted: 01 Jan 2012  |  By: Jane Somerville

Positioned “on a threshold” is the way Sydney-based artist Deborah Marks explains her artistic practice. Although she has exhibited her work in many group shows since the 1980s, it was only this year that Marks held her first solo exhibition — the culmination of a Masters of Fine Arts degree at The National Art School.

The exhibition was titled Unspoken Moments and the starting point was the exploration of the opposition of roles in the role of the dominatrix. Marks was interested in the outward representation of power versus the internal vulnerability of the individual. Working through pictorial conventions from Western art history, in particular the works of Vermeer, Marks’s paintings and photographic montages developed into an examination of the unconscious. During her creative process “a synthesis of the objective and subjective faculties merge the conscious and unconscious perception” which created “a deeper psychological resonance” in the artwork.

Marks’s paintings feature one or more female figures situated in theatrical settings. Slightly abstracted, the facial features are blurred, alluding to a dream sequence. Liminal State depicts two female figures, one on the floor half clothed in a position of surrender, while another fully clothed figure stands behind conveying a mood of authority. A subdued colour palette and contrasts in tone heighten the feeling of drama. Vulnerable, yet menacing, the figures appear isolated from each other and there is a sense of unease. On the wall behind is the reflection of a third face. These faces, Marks explains, demonstrate different psychological states inherent within the individual: the self with its vulnerability and desires, and the persona empowered through an exterior mask. Marks’s composition seeks to demonstrate the splitting of the psyche and the tension between conflicted psychological states — where the internal drive competes against that of the external world. In presenting her figures in opposing positions, they become caught in their own contemplation of opposing states and, as a result, rendered mute.

While the paintings convey an undertone of psychological anguish, the photographic montages starkly contrast internal and external worlds. Marks photographed external locations that incited feelings of foreboding: images of bathrooms, exterior views, wrought iron elements, architectural features and shadows. Collaged together with images of her model, they are rendered in black and white with hints of colour to lift the dramatic intensity. The different overlapping images sit within an “ambiguous multidimensional visual space” which represents the unconscious and conscious mind. That the composition was created through a largely intuitive process sees the resulting work function as, Marks explains, a “subliminal mind space”.

Beginning with an examination of opposing female roles of power and submission, Marks’s series of photographic montages and paintings have expanded to encapsulate the human condition in the push and pull of the ego and the id. Witnessing Marks’s figures lost in thought, the viewer might question their own position on the threshold.

Images from top:

Deborah Marks, Liminal State, 2010, ink and acrylic on card, 62 x 50cm.

Deborah Marks, Unspoken Moment, 2010, oil on canvas, 120 x 100cm.