b. 1959, UK; lives and works in Manchester

2000-2001 Manchester Metropolitan University, MA
1997-2000 Manchester Metropolitan University, BA


Susie MacMurray is best known for her interventions in historic spaces, such as Pallant House, Kedleston Hall and Southwark Cathedral. Formerly a professional musician, MacMurray creates surreal and poetic site-specific installations that are at once seductive, confrontational and immersive. The key issue in her work has been identified by a critic as “the tension between extremes of sensual and aesthetic response: ying/yang, anima/animus, freedom/constraint”.

The artist herself has expressed her fundamental interest in understanding how we cope with the human condition and ultimately, with mortality. For Cure3, MacMurray has produced two works, one of which is Duo, an uplifting, lyrical sculpture that connects, through its materials, to music and nature. Duo’s apparent fragility is protected by the cube/shell, whose confines are at the same time negated by the sculpture’s weightlessness. MacMurray’s practice has been informed by her personal experience of loss due to illness and her contribution to Cure3 contains all the ambiguity, opulence and sense of trauma of her larger works.

“I feel like Little Foundling is a little soul that is sheltered by the cube. Curled, with its armour only half-formed. It is potentially beautiful, but ill-equipped to be out in the world unprotected. To be human is to be vulnerable. It is always possible that in the blink of an eye, all that stands between a person and oblivion could be the kindness and generosity of strangers.”

www.pangolinlondon.com
www.susie-macmurray.co.uk

Portrait courtesy the Artist