Launch event: Friday 19 September 2025
at On Reflection: Cathy Lomax with Tamar Jeffers McDonald
Atrium Gallery, University of Brighton, Grand Parade, Brighton

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Issue Contributors:
Lucy Cade, Eloise Calandre, Cathy Lomax, Alex Michon,
Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Katherine Allen, Janet Sainsbury

Mirror Mirror

Welcome to the 50th issue of Arty, a landmark that I could not of imagined reaching while photocopying Arty no.1 back in 2001. To celebrate, the issue is all about one of my favourite subjects – mirrors.

The shallow surface of a traditional mirror is made from applying a layer of reflective material – lead, tin, mercury, zinc – to glass. This magical invention, which art and literature has historically
used as a prop to demark mainly female gazers as vain and fatuous, is far more complex than this one-dimensional reading suggests. A decorative mirror’s promise may have magical ‘mirror, mirror on the wall’ connotations, but this status as the embodiment of superficiality masks a fascinating complexity. To unlock the secrets of the mirror involves succumbing to its visual allure, it is only then that the hypnotic repetitions and oppositions may just, to paraphrase Michael Bracewell, turn surface into depth, and reveal multiple layers of meaning.

On-screen a mirror is a useful prop, it can supply an unexpected angle, dynamize a dreary scene, allow us to imagine the inner thoughts of a character, or suggest an untrustworthy duplicity that wasn’t previously apparent. But it isn’t only mise-en-scène that is enlivened by a mirror, because as Nico promises in ‘I’ll be Your Mirror (reflect what you are)’, the stars we gaze at on our multifarious screens are effective mirrors living the lives we dream of. Inside the issue, screen legend Doris Day is the focus of Tamar Jeffers McDonald’s mirror investigations, while I foreground Jennifer Jones, a lesser-known star of the 1940s and 50s.

The mirror is also a familiar device in art history, traditionally signifying, as Jeffers McDonald notes, 'female egotism centred around appearance'. Katherine Allen interrogates this by positioning the mirror as 'an active participant [...] withholding as much as it gives' in her own thoughtful monoprints. In 'Doubles and Triples' Lucy Cade is concerned with the mirror as an image duplicator, while Janet Sainsbury considers appearances of the mirror in the work of Winifred and Ben Nicholson, and Barabara Hepworth, three artists whose lives and artworks were intertwined.

Beyond its practical purposes a mirror has magical qualities. Eloise Calandre's poem 'Nightclub' is accompanied by a series of artworks in which shadows act as reflections. Alex Michon (whose artwork also appears on the cover of the first issue of Arty) considers shimmer and glitter as exemplified by the hypnotic mirrored surface of the mirror ball, alongside her own bejewelled textile works. Mirrors have always had a connection with magic, usually of the dark variety. It is said that if you look into the dark surface of the scrying mirror (often made of obsidian) for long enough your future partner may be revealed, or maybe, like the magical mirror used by Snow White’s stepmother, it might just connect you with the fairytale version of Siri.

Cathy Lomax
September 2025

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Arty 50

£5 + UK postage (contact us for international orders)

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To celebrate the publication of the 50th issue
We are releasing 50 Arty Articles From The Archives