Margaret Ackland’s meticulous paintings explore issues of identity through an examination of clothing’s connection to the self. Exploring the way that identity is formally created and structured by the clothing that we wear, Ackland also examines how the self may imprint back into a garment, which then forever retains a memory of its wearer. Through this intangible and evocative two way process, the symbolic weight of clothing is apparent - it can make us appear or disappear, it can control, constrain, mask, titillate, make external what is internal, and hide what is otherwise obvious.

In her works, the void created by the absence of the physical body serves to emphasize the inescapable connectedness between the body and the garments that wrap it. The garments, shaped and constructed, stand ready to be completed and filled by their wearers, as water is poured into a vessel. In other works, items of clothing are depicted as discarded, slipped off, packed up, or set aside.

These private histories occupy a space between inanimate and living form and remind us that we are here for only just a brief moment.

Margaret Ackland is represented in a range of national collections including Artbank, the Holmes a Court Collection and Deakin University. She has won and been a five time finalist in the Portia Geach Portrait Prize, a Blake Prize finalist and has had her work featured in Italian Vogue and on ABC TV's Compass series.

'Ackland's works bring to mind the touch of familiar materials: cool silk slips, stiff white shirts, the rustle of the wedding dress, the crinkle of white tissue, the soft gasp of the drycleaners bag. The clothes we inhabit take on something of our shape and form, a trace of us, and in so doing are no longer mass produced items but are gradually moulded to reflect qualities of their owners.'

Isobel Johnston