Irena Posner

Irena works with stone, plaster, wax and papier mâché. The materials are often salvaged, especially the blocks of stone which are discarded by quarries and stone yards due to fractures or discolouration.

Irena's work explores the fragmented female body, the fecundity and repletion of form set against somatic desire and societal expectations from that body. The resulting forms are bulbous, figurative, biomorphic. 

Irena's sculptures are part-anatomical part-clinical, aware of their own limits and desires. This is in contrast to the violence inflicted on the material in the derivation of the form: it is hammered, ground, bruised, brutalised, and only smoothed over in the final stages. Stone is inflexible, heavy and difficult to handle. If you look closely at finished stone you can still see some scratches, bruises, dents and sometimes small fossils.

It is difficult to ignore one's own body in the process of carving a piece of stone. The physical demands, the desire to overcome pain, the stone shaping your own body as much as you shape it. The energy that goes into production is meditative, enduring, rhythmic, tests your strength and your own limits. In this sense a stone’s relationship to the body has become integral to Irena's work.

Stone outlives flesh in every way. We are formed of it and we become it, yet it remains an object of commodification and fetishization, a kind of corps étranger.