Interview with Susie MacMurray at Pangolin London

07/12/20

Interview with Susie MacMurray 

Former classical musician Susie MacMurray (b1959) retrained as an artist during the era of the YBAs, but she is as far removed from their style of “one-liner” work as could be, focusing very much on the materiality and poetry of a piece, combining unconventional materials –  such as red velvet, feathers, wax and barbed wire – to create seductive yet misleading installations, which lure the viewers in, but then cause them to step away in surprise and ask questions. Vulnerability and resilience, danger and attraction, mystery and wonder, life and death – these are all present in MacMurray’s work, which, like a fairytale, centres on alchemy and transformation. 

With an exhibition at Pangolin London, including a site-specific installation – or “drawing in space” – and some new bronze works (MacMurray’s first time working with this material), made in the Pangolin foundry, the artist spoke to Studio International about her collaborative and repetitive way of working, her love of dualities, and her self-discovery as an artist later in life.

Read the full interview here

Essay: Eileen Cooper: Under the Same Moon at Letitia Gallery, Beirut

01/02/18

Catalogue essay for

Eileen Cooper: Under the Same Moon 

Letitia Gallery, Beirut

They stood there marvelling at the forest,

gazing at the lofty cedars

When Eileen Cooper visited Lebanon in the autumn of 2017, she too, like the ancient Sumerian demigod and king Gilgamesh some three millennia earlier, was inspired by the lofty cedars. An artist whose work has long drawn on the symbolism of and mythology associated with trees, she was struck by their beauty, size, and stability. The artist and writer Emily Carr (1871-1945), describing her native Canadian cedars, noted: ‘Cedars are terribly sensitive to change of time and light – sometimes they are bluish cold-green, then they turn yellow warm-green – sometimes their boughs flop heavy and sometimes float, then they are fairy as ferns and then they droop, heavy as heartaches.’ Cooper, with a shared artist’s sensibility, felt similarly enchanted. Upon her return to London, wanting to make works responding to these great trees, she set out to seek a nearby specimen, eventually chancing upon one in Greenwich Park, south London, which became her model, in as far as she ever uses one, helping to prompt as she began to draw.

Read the full essay in the catalogue