4&Twenty

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Marie-Therese has worked for many years in the education departments of museums both in New York and in London including the National Gallery and the Wallace Collection. Having received her BA as a painter in the early 1980s at Loughborough College of Art and Design, she then studied sculpture in Germany for a year at Karlsruhe Kunst Akademie with the British sculptor Michael Sandle RA. Marie-Therese was awarded an MA in sculpture from the University of Pennsylvania in the USA. 

Her work has been described as Magical Realism. she explores the world from within, by focussing on the human figure and animals – imagery includes, crows, wolves and fragmented female forms – created as the container for our consciousness, and her exploration of themes. These issues include sexuality, identity, personal experiences, and memory, combined with fairy tale like imagery.

Her early background as a painter allows her to move seamlessly back and forth between two and three dimensional ways of working. She continuously experiments with materials and structure, looking for equivalences of mark and form in a variety of media and allows each work to dictate its needs. 

Collage is an important part of her creative process; she often works with paper collage as well as using wood and mixed media. She makes sculptures with a variety of materials including paper and wood as well as found objects, mixed media and raw materials. Her work might hang on the wall, lean or sit between wall and floor, or move completely into the physical space of the viewer. 

Marie-Therese regularly participates in group shows in various galleries including APT Gallery, NoFormat Gallery and Arthouse1. Her work is in collections in the USA, Germany, France, and the UK. 

4&Twenty 

This show features works in paper which were made during lockdown and reflect the experience and atmosphere of isolation and confinement. She has long been fascinated by crows and blackbirds and during lockdown nature started taking back control, animals like wild boar and goats started coming back into urban neighbourhoods. In parks and carparks people witnessed and felt threatened by huge flocks of black birds and crows congregating, resembling large dark clouds. Spikey and jagged black paper crows flock and crowd together. These are not friendly birds, they are noisy and feisty. Crows are seen as symbols of transformation and change, and can be credited with foresight. The artworks are made entirely of paper, using different techniques including slotting, folding and gluing. There are free standing birds as well as a concertina book titled: 4&Twenty with the first lines of the nursery rhyme ‘Sing A Song Of Sixpence’. The birds here are two dimensional and in relief, some are in flight others sit in a tree. The book can be displayed in a linear way or in the round. 

There are also six small postcards titled ‘Avoid Touching Your Eyes’. Carefully drawn hands mounted onto black cards hold painted roses, eyes and dried seaweed. The eyes and roses are painted in water colour and the eyes dangle from the finger tips with red thread. ‘Avoid Touching Your Eyes’ was one of the advisories given during lockdown; we learned that our hands could transfer the virus and that different substances could keep it alive. 

Website: http://www.mariethereseross.com/

Instagram: @marietherese_ross