Irena Posner

Name: Irena Posner

Age: Timeless

Training: Royal College of Art, Carrara quarry, Portland Stone and Quarry Trust

Highly skilled: Shape shifting, extreme flexibility, dog whispering

Health: Germinating, practical build, strong lungs, two fillings, 21% muscle density, liver function is within normal range.

Select solo and exhibitions include: Flesh, Old Operating Theatre, London (2020), WIP, Royal College of Art, London (2020), Movement, Tate Exchange, Tate Modern, London (2019), Unfinished, Peckham Levels, London (2018), Light Ignites our Inspiration, Asylum, London (2018), Snorkel, Cookhouse Gallery Chelsea, London (2018), Fragments, The Garage, London (2017), Still Lives, Erarta Gallery (2016), London Griffin Gallery Open, Griffin Gallery, London (2015)

Upcoming exhibitions include: Way Out East solo show (2022), Eastbury Open House (2022)

Awards: Gilbert Bayes Award, Royal Society of Sculptors (2021); Griffin Gallery London, Winsor & Newton Painting Prize (2015) 

Residencies: Way Out East, London (2022); Ponte Di Ferro, Carrara (2022); Carusi Studios, Carrara (2021); Portland Stone and Quarry Trust, Weymouth (2020)

Collections: Fondazione Benetton, Treviso, Italy

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.