Cavin Morris Gallery
Collection de l’art brut
When “Missionary” Mary Proctor was born in 1960, in Florida, her eleven-year-old mother gave baby Mary to her parents to bring up. Proctor wanted to preach but instead worked as a nurse and the proprietor of a flea-market shop. She had visions before and after a house fire took the lives of several family members, One commanded her to paint. At first, she painted portraits on doors and went on to create mixedmedia works using buttons, artificial jewels, and glass.
Seldon Rodman Collection
Mary Proctor
Marilena Pelosi (b. 1957) believes that creating her sexually explicit ink drawings may help her heal from trauma she experienced early in life. An unfocussed child with autistic traits, she was not helped by having to flee her native Brazil to avoid a forced marriage to a Voodoo priest. Eventually, Pelosi settled in France, where her enigmatic depictions of sexual activity, women in torture chambers, ovaries and penis-shaped devices, and exorcism and spiritual rebirth, have earned her work critical attention.
Evelyn Postic
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After her mother died, Laure Pigeon (1882–1965) was brought up by her grandparents in Brittany, in northwestern France. Later, after leaving her husband, she moved into a boardinghouse. There, she met a woman who introduced her to Spiritualism, which Pigeon practised in private. In 1935, Pigeon began making drawings that she considered to be mediumistic; she did not show them to anyone. These abstractions feature dense thickets of blue-ink lines and illegible messages and prophecies.
In Haiti, Louisiane Saint Fleurant (1924–2005) began painting in her late forties after joining the Saint Soleil Group as a cook. Later, she left that art association as an artist and became a founding — and the only female — member of the Cinq Soleil art movement. Stippling vividly coloured paint and using no linear perspective, she depicted nature and everyday life, putting women centre stage in her art and incorporating Voodoo motifs. Saint Fleurant sold her paintings and sculptures, featuring humorous caricatures of Haitian stock figures, in her own shop, along with her two artist sons’ creations. Evelyne Postic (née Mazaloubaud) was born in 1951 in Lyon, France. She loved dancing, but lung disease prevented her from pursuing that activity. She felt abandoned after her parents separated but found solace in making art. Her work evokes her childhood experiences in images filled with organic forms, such as lung-like shapes recalling her early pulmonary disease, or allusions to the pain caused by her parents’ neglect. Postic creates forms combining human, animal and plant-like elements. Her art explores the theme of metamorphosis, reflecting the changes she has made in order to survive.
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