Mariana del Castillo: Fugitive Faith at the Fitters' Workshop is a challenging and multilayered exhibition

Mariana del Castillo is a well-known Canberra-based sculptor, whose work in the past few years has been developing in interesting and challenging directions.

She came to Australia from her native Ecuador as a child and, after an absence of more than 40 years, she returned in 2015 for a visit to the land of her childhood. Part of the migrant experience is the romantic filtering of memories of a homeland that is no longer real, tangible or accessible, but frozen in time. A return to that homeland leads to the creation of an alternative reality, where childhood memories of that which existed 40 years ago are checked against that which exists today and between these various levels of reality, seams open up. The sculptural figures that have been assembled in this exhibition appear to dwell in these seams and comment on the surrounding levels of reality.

Some years ago in her art practice, del Castillo started to employ mannequins that she would transform into allegorical creations, including saints, effigies and personifications, which would bear witness to her time, to the past and to ghosts created through memory. Subsequently she has moved into neon art, in part thanks to a grant from CAPO, so that the names of these figures have now become emblazoned above them. In the somewhat gloomy space of the Canberra Fitters' Workshop, which with this exhibition is being brought into the circuit of Canberra art venues, the neon strips cast a strong presence through both their decipherable messages and the pools of light that they produce.

The exhibition is in part autobiographical, in part a comment on the migrant experience, and in part a protest at the consumerism found in contemporary Australian society. When the family migrated, the artist's mother, who had trained as a pattern maker and seamstress, set up shop in a flat above a Greek delicatessen in Kingsford in Sydney. Mariana del Castillo recalls that the "sound of her sewing machine was the soundtrack of my childhood". The neon signs are a voice of authority as well as a comforting memory, but they also they represent the brashness of consumer culture "the onslaught of brightly lit advertising that blinked into my Kingsford bedroom at night keeping time with the sewing machine".

The fact that most of the materials employed in del Castillo's sculptural tableaux have been recycled adds an additional level of social commentary on what society chooses to discard, so that this detritus can come back to haunt the society that rejected it. Most of the figures in this exhibition have a ghost-like presence and an ambiguity in their possible levels of meaning. I touch is a strange armless, life-size mannequin with a handle from a suitcase around its waist and with a head, sunk into the body without the benefit of a neck, bearing an agonised expression. Above a neon sign announces "i touch". The artist describes herself as a "lapsed Catholic" and for me the piece may touch on the institutionalised sexual abuse in the Catholic Church as well as serving as a comment on the irony of a handless figure proclaiming the sense of touch. Other memorable neon creations at the exhibition include Reset, Discard and Her Pride.

The motif of the suitcase recurs throughout the exhibition, possibly a reference to the migrant experience. It may also carry the idea that a person is a constant wayfarer and although people may find, temporarily, a safe harbour, they remain lonely in a crowd and are in a constant state of migration in search of safety and peace.

The artist's Ecuadorian heritage constantly reasserts itself throughout the exhibition as she creates these archetypal figures. As certain dark things are to be loved is an effigy to St Lucy, whose attribute is her eyes, with a reference to her torture by eye-gouging. Her inspirational spiritual companion, St Agatha, appears in the form of a figure with the enigmatic title Tell me: is the rose naked or is that her only dress? Her attribute of severed breasts refers to the cutting off of her breasts with pincers as part of her path to martyrdom. These saints from the churches of Ecuador join other figures that draw on local sayings, including, The tongue has no bone and Misery always waiting with open arms.

For a conceptual framework, del Castillo turned to one of her most beloved artworks, Goya's Los caprichos. Here, in his 80 aquatints created in the final year of the 18th century, Goya produced a profound critique of contemporary society; one where superstition, ignorance, gossip and a backward church led to the triumph of the "sleep of reason". This is a modern interpretation of Los caprichos, where the artist creates her own personal allegorical language to critique society and in the process explores her own past to see how it has shaped her perception of the present.