Mary Coleman developed an interest in the world of medicine at a very early age. She recalls her first Kindergarten ‘show and tell’ was about the Black Plague.

Her fascination with this world, in particular, the mysterious realm of institutions, has become the inspiration for the collection of paintings that make up this extraordinary exhibition entitled Institution.

The imagery is derived from a combination of archival photographs of from19th and early 20th century asylum patients and the artist’s own photographs of the derelict asylums these people once inhabited.

The exhibition is divided in two parts: small, intense portraits of the inhabitants – doctors and patients, adults and children, and larger, more loosely rendered interiors of the abandoned and disused spaces.

Dressed in an odd mixture of ill-fitting and/or age/gender inappropriate clothing, the subjects, staring defiantly from the frame, retain a poignant and eerie grace.

The paintings lead the viewer down echoing corridors and dingy stairwells into a twilight world where ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest’ meets ‘Oliver Twist’, in all of its Dickensian squalor. It makes for uncomfortable viewing.

As a commentator during Dickens time wrote …”I do not like those things; I wish to avoid them. I do not like them in reality and therefore do not like to see them represented.” Mary Coleman is not afraid to ‘go there’.

The viewing experience is intense yet rewarding. While our sensibilities are shaken by the brutal nature of the painting’s subject, we are, simultaneously, seduced by the subtle colour and delicate application of the paint.

Mary Coleman was born in Portland Oregon and now lives in Auckland where she is completing a BFA (Honours) at Elam School of Fine Arts. Institution is her first solo exhibition.