The House of Martha and Mary

The House of Martha and Mary, 1993

Bronze, edition of 6
35 × 46 × 34 cm
Cast by Ken Cook

About the work

The House of Martha and Mary was made in 1993 and takes its title and imagery from Diego Velázquez’s Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, probably painted in 1618 and now in the National Gallery, London.

Rather than reproducing Velázquez’s figures or biblical narrative, Burns brings the objects of his extraordinary foreground still life into three dimensions. The plate of fish, garlic, red pepper and earthenware jug become the protagonists of the sculpture.

In Velázquez’s painting, these humble kitchen objects occupy much of the foreground, while the biblical encounter between Christ, Martha and Mary appears at the back of the composition. The National Gallery describes the foreground as an everyday kitchen scene containing fish, garlic, a shrivelled red pepper and an earthenware jug, probably containing olive oil. 

Burns isolates these objects from the painting and reconstructs them in bronze. What was painted still life becomes sculpture: objects that can be walked around and encountered physically. The transformation also plays with the traditional hierarchy between subject and setting. In Velázquez, the apparently ordinary objects of domestic labour dominate the foreground while the sacred narrative is displaced into the distance; in Burns’s sculpture, the figures disappear altogether and the objects themselves carry the reference.

This relationship between everyday life, food, domestic objects and art history became an important strand in Burns’s sculpture of the 1990s. The House of Martha and Mary belongs to a wider body of work in which objects and motifs drawn from historical painting were remade as independent sculptures, allowing a detail from an earlier work of art to acquire a new life and meaning.

Art-historical reference

The source is Diego Velázquez, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, probably 1618, National Gallery, London, NG1375. The painting measures 60 × 103.5 cm and was bequeathed to the National Gallery by Sir William H. Gregory in 1892. 

The connection is unusually precise: the fish, garlic, pepper and jug in Burns’s bronze correspond directly to objects occupying Velázquez’s kitchen foreground. The National Gallery itself emphasises the unusual way Velázquez combines an everyday kitchen scene with the biblical story of Martha and Mary. 

Documented exhibition history

• Delaney Gallery, Perth — documented in an installation photograph, with the sculpture visible on the front central plinth.
• Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne, 1996 — Stephanie Burns (McDonald), 21 September–17 October 1996.
• Pangolin London, 2022 — Ken Cook: Out of the Workshop.

• Classic Yass and Yass Arts Trail, 2010 & 2011 Orion Sculpture Park, Yass, NSW, Australia 

• Los Angeles, 2018 — Elysium Verto – Paradise is Changing.