Summary
A city is not so much a comprehensible totality as it is a shifting field of urban ecologies that represent life, both individual and communal. In ‘All Parts Held’, artist Moya McKenna points to this conception through her reflexive representation of facets that comprise her experience of creative life in Melbourne; quite literally, as the painting’s title suggests, a pair of disembodied arms embrace elements of the artist’s life: the pedestrian bridge that marks her city journeys, the red-brick studio building in which she works, a painting she has created … But, asks Chris McAuliffe in his essay on artists and the city (accessible via the ‘Explore’ tab above), ‘is [McKenna] more concerned with the problem of declaring intangibles (living, looking, creating) into the physical field of the canvas’ than tangible aspects of the city?
Painted in 2009, this work came into the Art and Heritage Collection the same year, after it was shown in the ‘Bridges, Paths, Walls’ exhibition at Melbourne gallery Neon Parc. Like virtually all of McKenna’s works, it has been executed in oil, using a wet-on-wet technique, which gives it richness, texture and depth.
