painter and teacher, is an Irish Catholic who attended art college in Ireland aged 17:
then I got married in my final year and started teaching. I absolutely never wanted to be a teacher but it was a safe, secure job that you could do and later I had to support my husband through his M.A. I have successfully got out of marriage, but there’s no way I could abandon my children. In some ways my escape from marriage was an act of self-expression and I feel very free after it. But it hasn’t helped my painting as I’m still hampered by all these domestic problems (interview, p.91).
A feminist and socialist admirer of Georgia O’Keefe, MacLennan worked in Queensland in 1978, teaching at a girls’ school and doing symbolic plant drawings ('abstract archetype symbols that would be a symbol of the feminine in a very abstract way’). A drawing in Hecate 2/1 (January 1976), 21, depicts a woman (apparently a self-portrait) in a tropical landscape with little Gothic church and mining frame.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1999
- Last updated:
- 2011
