Lynn Dennison’s sculptures made of paper (sometimes painted or pre-printed), wire and textiles explore the connected themes of gender, identity, place and costume. Her technique of ‘fleshing out’ dresses with delicate white paper allows her to give each of her sculptures its own texture.
Cut-out Roses Dress is a wire-framed, floorlength, miniature paper dress for which Dennison has cut the silhouettes of roses and their leaves throughout the dress, as though nature is growing through and absorbing its femininity. For Black Forest Cut-out Dress the artist has cut out the silhouettes of evergreen ‘Christmas’ style trees, circling the dress in a spiral format, as though nature is rising up from the ground to absorb its unnatural form. Cut-out Roses Dress (2003–2004) can be seen to be exploring the way changing light can affect moods and perceptions, while in Cut-out Trees Jacket Dennison displays forms of winter and summer trees throughout the jacket, as though nature has been planted upon it.
Everyone can identify with the visual world Dennison creates, as it is a landscape of myth and memory that we all recognise and share. For her, an artwork is not the culmination of spiritual revelations about the landscape, but the embodiment of personal narratives and intimate histories. She acknowledges the importance of familial networks and formative experience in conditioning her creative response to the earth. Dennison’s Cut-out Dresses are questioning our innate connection with the Earth and hint that what remains here are the shadows, which stretch languorously across the exhibition wall, mocking us with their lost vitality.
Lynn Dennison’s four sculptures are an important addition to Tullie House’s collection. As a Cumbrian-born artist Lynn Dennison fits perfectly with the museum’s collecting priorities to represent established, emerging, and diverse Cumbrian artists. Her work also enables the museum to expand the collection of works by women artists and sculptors, which are both underrepresented. The museum is opening major new galleries devoted to the Tullie House Costume Collection and is actively expanding in line with this. Lynn Dennison’s sculptures will provide an important contemporary response. The natural motifs in her sculptures also relate to Cumbria, the most biodiverse county in England, to the museum’s recently designated Natural Science collection and to current debates around the environment and climate change.
