MARGARET LAWLOR-BARTLETT: The Body Owned
14 - 24 August 2023
Exhibition Opening: Sunday 13 August, 4pm
Beacroft Gallery, Lake House Arts, 37 Fred Thomas Drive, Takapuna (map)
Margaret Lawlor-Bartlett’s outward-facing artworks over the years on matters ranging from institutional patriarchy, apartheid, a nuclear-free Pacific to climate change and our ecological future comprise a vigorous commentary on social and environmental issues facing New Zealand and the world at large. They are well-known and justly celebrated.
But the focus of this exhibition of works from 1990 - 2016 on various media is a less well-known feature of her practice, relating to her inward perspectives.
These works celebrate the human body, the burden that women bear as child-bearers and different facets of human sexuality. Also the confronting reality that ageing of elderly parents or grandparents brings to every family home.
Several of Lawlor-Bartlett’s personal symbols appear in these works: the artist’s beloved Mt Tarawera, the ruru as Kaitiaki, and the measurement of time via the geologically stratified earth to which we must all return eventually.
Throughout these works the one unifying theme is that of the human body, depicted with unflinching honesty.
“In the end, all I have that is truly mine is my body” (ML-B)
Lawlor-Bartlett, Margaret, The Dance of Love, 2016
Margaret Lawlor-Bartlett QSM is an artist who is an outspoken voice on social issues that have shaped our nation's identity over 70 years of change, addressing waves of feminism and institutional patriarchy, tackling the shame of apartheid, and inspiring the Visual Artists Against Nuclear Arms movement (VAANA). Most recently her works touch upon global environmental concerns from the New Zealand perspective.
“I am exploring the ways by which a political art might again emerge in strength to help change people’s thinking, and therefore the course of our living history”
— Margaret Lawlor-Bartlett
Margaret Lawlor-Bartlett was awarded the Queen’s Service Medal for services to the NZ Anti-Nuclear Arms Movement and her role in initiating VAANA together with its associated public murals. She is a founding member of the NZ Association of Women Artists.
“Margaret Lawlor-Bartlett is an artist whose place in Aotearoa’s art history will be remembered through her bold unmasking of our social history as a protest artist, and her introspective explorations of human consciousness, relationships, and survival, as seen and expressed, from a woman’s point of view.”
— Julian Harrison
