Penny McCarthy: How to Look Through Time

Penny McCarthy sets out to find new ways to consider time, loss and preservation. The work she makes explores how the past resonates through the present and the future – how time becomes embedded in historic material, and how it is inherent in our engagement with past objects, artworks and ideas. 

Through her thoughtful, often delicate works, McCarthy invites the viewer to consider how time affects the way we view and understand art. For How to Look Through Time, she presents a new series of work that uses a 16th century Titian print to examine the role historic artwork can have in our lives today. McCarthy’s drawings, film and experiments with glass are displayed in direct dialogue with Titian’s The Submersion of Pharaoh’s Army in the Red Sea (c. 1549), 12 individually printed woodcuts which create a single image at grand scale.  

Created following months of careful study of the Titian work, McCarthy’s resulting responses consider what happens to an image when it is re-encountered, recontextualized, recombined — when a particular frame of reference is undone, what new one takes its place?

Alongside McCarthy’s works on paper, How to Look Through Time will also include The Light of Other Years, a series of glass works, and a new short film made with film maker Hugo Glendinning.

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