In this exhibition, Elizabeth Rankin does not portray perfect bodies, or exaggerated imperfect bodies, but the bodies of older women and pregnant women with the changes that these two things bring. The hands of the women deny total access to their bodies and at the same time are self-caressing and self -defining.

Included is a painted dress that her painted women might enjoy, with images painted on the cloth to extend the meaning of the forms. Dress is the new skin chosen to mask or display the self and here stands just as itself untethered to a body. Related to this is Rankin’s short video Thin Ice, in which hand drawn watercolour images of women celebrate the body through dance. The fluttering shapes quiver and twirl to a pattern in adjusting patterns and groupings in silent agreement.

Exhibition runs from 5 to 27 September. Gallery open Saturday and Sunday, 12 to 3pm.

Contact the host of Elizabeth Rankin — The Image of Her solo exhibition