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Susie MacMurray solo show at Agnews Gallery

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Time 10:00
Date 09/11/11
Price Free

Described as transcendently beautiful yet tinged with sinister undertones the imposing work of Susie MacMurray has been compared to the late Louise Bourgeois.

Known for her large scale, site-specific installations - especially within historic buildings - MacMurray's commissions have included filling the entire attic space of Islington Mill in Salford with 80kg of feather down; wrapping 105 miles of gold embroidery thread throughout Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire; building a wall of silver plated mussel shells lined with velvet at Pallant House, Chichester; and hanging 10,000 hairnets containing used violin bow hair in York St Mary's in association with the York Museums Trust.

For this show MacMurray continues her artistic alchemy, reforming the banal – hairnets, balloons, wires and cling film – into the graceful, ephemeral and opulent. In this way her work is grounded in Dada and Surrealist traditions and although many of her works are, on first inspection, pretty in appearance, they harbour ambiguous and sinister undertones. Her use of materials is provocative and perturbing, at once luxuriant and frugal, tactile and brittle. A bridal gown is ironically constructed out of thousands of household gloves in a kind of cautionary tale about domestic reality. Each glove is turned inside out to reveal its pale downy interior, like flayed skin, they are testament to the vulnerability of humankind. At the other end of the spectrum, household clingfilm is tightly moulded and wrapped into shining, silken cocoons.

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