Alma Mariner
Etching on Hahnemühle
810 x 1020mm
"Alma Mariner reimagines the art school as a medieval landscape - a composite world where students appear as fish, lecturers as robed fishmen, and creatures like bulls and greyhounds take on symbolic roles. The composition draws from illuminated manuscripts, using flattened space, layered architecture, and marginalia to build a fragmented narrative of institutional life.
The phrase school of fish acts as a structural pun, guiding the logic of the scene. Across multiple planes, we encounter decaying fish carcasses, students in motion, and figures entrenched in ritual. Institutional buildings - real and invented - become stages for quiet absurdity: a greyhound tags a wall with a fish, a bull sits before a drawing book, and a fish lounges in a window high above it all.
At the plate’s edges, marginalia subvert the central image - and occasionally infiltrate it. A ‘swordfish’ brandishes a sword. A dog rides a fish like a steed. A fish poses on a student ID. These details offer moments of humour and play, along with the inclusion of invented “-ness” words (thingness, pretentiousness, isness) echoing the often slippery language of art discourse, skewering it while participating in it.
Alma Mariner explores the art school as a second home - at once formative and performative, hierarchical and absurd. Through symbolic layering and subversive visual footnotes, the work reflects on the art world’s habits of myth-making and critique - all while swimming in its waters."
