Lisa Milroy at Parasol Unit

Known years ago for her paintings of shoes*, Lisa Milroy is showing paintings of garments ("Here and There" at Parasol Unit till 18 March).

First glimpse - real shoes and painted backgrounds, taken from
the patterning of the shoes, are on the floor

Composites - does the 2D clothing on the wall take you back to playing with paper dolls?

3D painting - the painting is on the fabric, sculpted as a garment

3D, as the "garment" starts to peel away from the canvas

2D painting - deconstructed garment

Viewers are invited to rearrange the garments on the wall ...

... so I did ...

Half "natural" garment, half painted ... which is the more "real"?

Don't know what to make of this ... the title was something like "nine garments for one person"

Simple and resonant! this goes beyond words to our feelings about our clothes

Somehow I missed seeing the first floor gallery:

"On the first floor gallery, the exhibition focuses on ‘There’ and presents a selection of monochromatic paintings that explore presence and absence, loss, time and memory – all themes recurrent in Milroy’s practice. Included is the monumental twenty-metre wide painting Black and White, 2004–2005, based on the artist’s studio, and Shoes, 1985, the only work from the 1980s in the exhibition, on loan from Tate and a touchstone painting for Milroy."

* "Shoes have been a recurrent motif in my practice since I began exploring ‘still life’ in the 1980s. Shoes, 2012 presents a single shoe repeated in rows against a grey background. This shoe is defined by two independent yet connected surfaces: the hard black shiny exterior and the soft blue-grey interior. The bright interior spaces of the shoe carve out hollows within the dark surface of the painting, turning the empty shoes into vessels full of light. This imagery keys the emotional dynamic of presence and absence and the physical dynamic of inside and outside, which reverberates throughout all my paintings in the exhibition, and chimes with aspects of Jayne [Parker]’s work. A number of my paintings feature a female personage suspended in a reciprocation between body and mind, while other works focus on the passing of time - both predominant themes in my practice.
Lisa Milroy" (via; the joint exhibition is at A.P.T. Gallery, Deptford, till 18 March)