LONDON.- This winter, Pangolin London will present an important solo exhibition of sculptures and drawings by Susie MacMurray, revealing the artist’s delight in working with curious materials in unusual combinations and a shift in her focus, from the thematic towards the haptic.

A central work in Material Thought will be Bride. This work dovetails MacMurray’s celebrated garment sculptures (which she has been making over the last twenty years) 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 ‘is comprised of some leftover, dusty 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’.

‘I decided to revel for a while in materiality’, says MacMurray of her practice since her last exhibition at Pangolin London (Murmur in 2020). But her revelling never lacks consideration for the cultural significance of each material. In this exhibition, thought provoking pairings abound; materials often associated with force – wire and rope – are softened at their edges with wax, mussel shells gather to form a point, and deer antlers are sliced and strung together to create a shape reminiscent of a heart. Here is an artist who has found power in tenderness.

MacMurray, who turned her hand from playing in professional orchestras to making sculpture in 2001, has a sensitivity to materials (and the immaterial) which has lent itself to creating some poignant site-specific installations – see, for example, Gathering at Tatton Park Mansion (2019) and Witness at the National Justice Museum (2021).*

The gallery also announced MacMurray’s most recent invitation to create a site- specific work for Lacoste’s Spring/Summer Collection runway show during Paris Fashion Week this October, for which she has transformed nets alluding to tennis into a dramatic catwalk centrepiece entitled Drift (images available upon request).

Earlier this year, MacMurray was invited for a residency at Marchmont House, Berwickshire, where she used the time to reflect on the impetus behind her work and made a series of large charcoal on paper drawings which will be on display alongside her sculptural forms in this forthcoming exhibition. ‘I am embracing my curiosity’, says MacMurray, for whom playing in an orchestra felt too constraining and resolved. Material Thought will be significant in bridging two chapters in MacMurray’s work, exploring the potential in materials at hand and transforming them with her close attention.