Mary Pye on Faith, Freedom, and Finding Her Voice
By Eirini Meze | MeSo Mag
You graduated last summer and had your debut show at Bulgari in London almost immediately after. How has your painting evolved since leaving art school?
Without the structure of art school, I feel a lot more freedom in my direction — so many more possibilities have opened up. I no longer have the critique of tutors and fellow students shaping my choices, so my work now follows a more naturally dictated path. It feels good.
Your work sits somewhere between the abstract and the figurative. How would you describe where it is right now?
At the moment it's more landscape-based. I'm incorporating a lot more geometric elements, and I'm much more focused on guiding the viewer's gaze to a specific point. At art school I was experimenting a great deal with the movement of paint itself. Now that I've become more experienced and comfortable with the materials, I layer geometric forms on top of what already exists on the canvas.
Can you walk us through your process? How many layers are we looking at?
It's very much a multi-layered process, built up over a longer period of time. I wait for each initial layer to dry before working over it again, but always very thinly. I'm cautious about applying paint too thick — I want light to feel like it's shining through. If I pile on too many heavy layers at once, it loses that sense of organic lightness. Letting it dry in between keeps me from overworking it.
Mary Pye, Studio shot
Your titles feel almost like lines of poetry — and many seem connected to faith and prayer. How do you arrive at them?
I write constantly. I always have a journal in my bag or my pocket, so I can write whatever comes to me at any moment of the day. As I'm painting, the writing isn't a direct narrative of the work — they exist alongside each other as separate things. Once a painting is finished, I go back through my journal and look at what I wrote during its creation. Whatever stands out to me becomes the title.
The writing itself varies enormously — sometimes it's very poetic, sometimes it's written in prose, and sometimes it's just raw, unbeautiful thoughts. Angry words, scattered ideas. And then there are moments of real inspiration, like something that strikes me on a walk, and I'll capture it in a very lyrical way. I draw from all of that.
As for faith — it's the foundation of my entire life. It's present in everything, even when it isn't consciously on my mind. Like a ribbon that threads through everything. I pray every day, I meditate every day. When I'm writing, when I'm painting, I'm seeing the world through a lens that has grown from my faith and my life within the church. It's simply the way I understand things.
Mary Pye
The large-scale and small-scale works feel very different in how they speak. What's your experience of making them?
I have to approach them completely differently. With the smaller canvases, everything is within my field of vision at once — I have total control. I can dictate exactly where your eye goes, whether that's a horizon line or a geometric detail pointing toward a specific spot.
With the larger works, I have no control at all. Paint moves in all sorts of directions, and to see the painting as a whole I have to stand so far back that I can't work while looking at the entire surface. I'm always up close, seeing just a small section, and when I step back I'm often surprised by what's there. With the large ones, the painting holds all the control. I'm just a small instrument helping it along.
But I genuinely love working at that scale.
And what do you want people to take from your work? Is there a message?
Not a manifesto, no. When I first started at art school I thought I needed a political stance, a motto — something to stand for. But the more I progressed, the more that felt dishonest. Why paint something that means something specific to me, when the person looking at it will bring their own meaning to it entirely?
What I hope for is that the work holds a certain aura — a feeling you can take away with you. The space I work in is very quiet, almost sacred. My faith is woven into that environment. I believe the paintings absorb that energy, and it stays in them.
Mary Pye is currently showing in The Mythologies of Colour, opening at Soho House Mumbai at the end of April, alongside artists Parnika Mittal, Mohini Kaur and Jessie Makinson. Enquire about Mary Pye's work and upcoming shows.