Sarah Maloney's Pleasure Ground by Laura Ritchie

Sarah Maloney’s Pleasure Ground: A Feminist Take on the Natural World is the first major survey of contemporary sculptor and textile artist Sarah Maloney, RCA. Recognized for her representations of botanicals and the human body, Maloney uses media ranging from embroidery to bronze to challenge ideas of “women’s work,” craft, and artistic labour. Maloney looks at Western history and culture through a feminist lens, and the results are depictions of plants, bones, and organs that reference gender, pleasure, desire, and power.

Sarah Maloney’s Pleasure Ground showcases Maloney’s artwork from her thirty-year career, with the selection of work exemplifying her explorations of sexuality, reproductivity, economics, and colonial systems of representation. Accompanying a nationally touring exhibition opening first at Art Windsor-Essex before moving to the MSVU Art Gallery, Halifax, in the spring of 2024, Sarah Maloney’s Pleasure Ground features essays by exhibition co-curator Laura Ritchie, textile scholar and curator Sarah Quinton, and Art Gallery of Nova Scotia CEO Sarah Moore Fillmore, as well as 70 full-colour images of Maloney’s provocative and joyful work.

Laura Ritchie (she/her) is an independent curator in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, NS. She is the former director of the MSVU Art Gallery and has previously worked with the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Museum London, Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Alberta, and Kelowna Art Gallery.

• 160 pages, Hardcover      
• Published by Goose Lane Editions with Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and Art Windsor-Essex, 2024
• ISBN: 9781773104195