Tuscany

Mary Bourne has spent two three month periods in Tuscany – as a Royal Scottish Academy John Kinross Scholar in Florence when a new graduate in 1985 and thirty years later as recipient of Royal Society of Sculptors’ Brian Mercer Award to Studio Sem in Pietrasanta.  These have proved to be touchstones in the development of her work.

John Kinross Scholarship 1985

This enabled Mary to study how Michelangelo imbued life, movement and feeling into the inert medium of stone, and to gain an understanding of how the Medieval mind built meaning into every part of a Church.  Central to this was understanding how sculpture and architecture worked in together to achieve a unified vision. See sketchbook image above.

Brian Mercer Award 2015

During this period, Mary revisited the idea of stone animated to become flesh – of the flickering between the illusion of transient life and the reality of the frozen immobility of stone statuary.  The vast array of stones from around the world available at Studio Sem ignited a use of colour in her work, in which she explored the symbolic use of stone in Medieval and Renaissance architecture. See images top right and below. Download publication here.

Since returning home Mary has continued exploring these themes, as well as curating a show to mark the 40^th anniversary of the Kinross Scholarships for the Royal Scottish Academy in 2021.

https://www.royalscottishacademy.org/video/6-andiamo-40-years-of-rsa-kinross-scholarships/