INSPIRER SERIES: Susie MacMurray - 17.03.15

• 2001 graduate of BA Sculpture and MA Fine Art, creates site specific works, large installations.
• Latex filled balloons, an early piece - she loved the juxtaposition of something voluptuous and full with being fragile. She was always getting her head around these things with materials.
• She found it really difficult to finish sculptures because she didn't feel like she had the arrogance or confidence to say that this was her piece of work and this is how it is. Second guessing herself a lot. Possibly for this reason, she wasn't happy with her degree show but appreciated that the degree show is in fact that beginning and not the end.
• FLOCK - Manchester, wall of black feathers.
• Hairnets, gauzy materials, an ephemeral piece about memory, deconsecrated workplaces, echoes of people. 10,000 hairnets made up a piece called ECHO and was installed to describe the volume of the space. There was nothing present in that piece that did not need to be there. This was in 2006, and she also lost her husband at that time.
• Installed a large piece on the walls of a house that was bound in histories of convenient, loveless marriages and riches-to-ruins stories. Hot glued 22,000 muscle shells containing red silk velvet. This piece was all about excess, luxury, money, seduction and sumptuousness. Students and volunteers helped her install it and she collected the muscles herself from a fish restaurant. The whole installation of the piece took 7 day, from morning until night and it stayed there for 18 months. she was surprised at how many people actually saw the piece, she didn't realise that the place had such a great traffic of people coming through its doors.

• Keddleston in Derbyshire - it was a house built to show off and the interiors do not veer from this intention. She created an installation of gold threat, the way it caught the light was so beautiful. Sometimes it would look solid, other times you couldn't see it at all. But particularly, it was lovely when it became hazy, like a lazy gold mist descending on the room.

• She has turned down many projects, despite being well paid, because she doesn't want to compromise her integrity, lose her soul in someways.
• She made a number of garments and gowns: rubber balloon dress, weighed about 8 stone. That was a piece that got her a lot of recognition. Latex glove dress, that has actually been bought now. Leather with needles in a particular dress that I liked - wearable sculpture...well just about wearable.
• She also makes many drawings and enjoys doing them, but feels the two sides of her practice don't match.