Mary Gibney mixes ready-made and found inspirational objects with handmade art and items to build up surfaces with clusters of paintings, drawings, collages, and ephemera to create an atmosphere. She attempts to come as close as possible to overwhelming the audience with detail while simultaneously inviting them in to examine and find their own meaning in her devotional art space
She is fascinated by body parts, peculiarities, weirdos and misfits, with a special love for heads (portrait and detached). Mindhole, her art environment at Hair + Nails Contemporary Arts, featured hanging and impaled papier mache heads, paintings, drawings, and collages mingled with child sized furniture and toys. Her creative process mindset is that more is better and there’s always room for another visual spark.
She often does series of drawings, paintings and collages based on a theme that occupies her mind for a while, rendering multiple images until the fever has passed. Her series of The Foot (a plaster Dr. Scholls model) evokes a fetishistic or religious object as well as being a representation of a body part. Mugshots, wrestlers, baseball players, sideshow performers, faces of dive bar patrons, and peep shows have been other obsessions.
She lives in Minneapolis, has a BFA from the University of Minnesota, and has exhibited widely locally as well as in other locations. She likes small bars with live music, biking down alleys, and the joy of discovering visual details of the city.
