Assemblages

Between 2019 and 2025, Mary Duggan produced a series of 50+ assemblages that examine present conditions through materials at hand. Made in timed one-hour sessions, the pieces are improvised compositions that bring together salvaged objects, flowers, and residual fragments, intuitively arranged and dated as records of a moment. Once completed, the assemblages were allowed to collapse and no longer exist, their brief formation preserved only through photographic record. Not made to scale, each work draws on architectural experience yet resists clear categorisation, forming figures that are at once familiar and ambiguous. Read anthropologically, the assemblages treat materials as active participants in the making of form: their textures, histories, and contingencies shaping the outcome as much as the author’s hand, giving the objects a quiet agency within the composition.

Materials: Oak twigs, flowers, foil, bells, sewing needles, dressmaking pins, hat pins, stones from Devon, books, wire, and other bits & pieces.