Legacy Landscape
2019
Drawing - felt tip and ink on acid-free paper
110 x 276.5 x 5cm (framed) | 100 x 266 x 0.2cm (unframed)
Photographs - Nick Ash
Legacy Landscape (2019) establishes a psychologically charged terrain in which individual stories exist within wider inherited histories. Following a year of drawing solitary female figures, Alanna Lawley introduces the female figure as a collective presence for the first time. This landscape presents women dancing through states of agony and abandon, where inherited histories are carried through the body with emotional intensity and converge with a desire to reclaim visibility, identity, and sexuality. Legacy Landscape reflects on memory as something embodied—shaping the present as much as the past.
The dense compositions, psychologically charged spaces, and states of bodily transformation introduced in Legacy Landscape continue to underpin Lawley’s practice, positioning the work as a foundational point in her ongoing exploration of embodiment, inheritance, and transformation.
Excerpt from the exhibition text for Seepage From My Primal Fountain (2024)
The genesis of Lawley's present work phase, Legacy Landscape (2019) manifests the liberatory potential of this process of shedding. The large-scale drawing depicts sharp-edged female archetypes isolated in various states of agony and abandon and yet interconnected through shared matrilineal trauma reaching back to the beginnings of time. Their entanglement is reminiscent of a primal dance, in whose ecstatic embrace the confines of corporeal individuality and injury dissolve and a communal subjectivity emerges. - Seepage From My Primal Fountain, 2024, exhibition text, Lisa Deml with Laura Allsop
Detail views