Pangolin London are delighted to present an important solo exhibition of sculptures and drawings by Susie MacMurray, revealing the artist's delight in working with curious materials in unexpected combinations, and a shift in her focus from the thematic towards the haptic.
A central work in Material Thought will be MacMurray's latest striking garment sculpture Bride. This work dovetails with this more recent body of work where her interest in materiality comes to the fore. MacMurray’s garment sculptures, like Medusa, Icarus, and Widow, explore facets of female identity and experience, but they can also be considered self-portraits.
A defining characteristic of MacMurray’s practice is her ability to work with materials that come to hand. ‘Bride’, she says ‘began with some unwanted white domestic ducting hose, thrown in the skip during the renovation of my kitchen’. Once gathered, the materials that she works with form an alphabet of sorts – never used in isolation and often in clusters. Ducting hose will feature throughout Material Thought in different guises – in some cases, folded in on itself to emulate something bodily: ‘deconstruct, reconstruct, transcend... it was literally the discarded guts of my house’.
