A Dynamic Sculptural Takeover of Aldeburgh Beach Lookout Tower
2023
Over 6 days in April 2023, Melissa Pierce Murray used an oversize sculpture kit of seemingly static sculptural forms to animate the tower and beach.
Inky structural spikes, sensual stony tangles, and painted abstract masses came to life in an awkward, exhilarating exploration of the Lookout Tower, spilling out of the doors and onto the beach.
Image Credits: Anne-Katrin Purkiss 2023
An interactive sculptural landscape motivated by the serious theme of creative play. Members of the public were invited to create new sculptural compositions, responding to the question, ‘What kind of spaces do we remember and imagine?’
Artwalk Wakefield, Wakefield Cathedral, 2022
When I was little I loved to play
Selecting and sorting found objects bending, breaking, and balancing things.
Climbing and clambouring, creating hiding places and sulking spaces.
Imagining and fashioning miniature worlds and along with them stories. Falling and rising, mapping out possibilites.
I still play
Join me as I bring my studio process into the street and together we’ll imagine and frame new futures.
The Hostry, Norwich Cathedral 2021
An exhibition raising awareness of Modern Slavery, featuring commissioned artworks by seven international artists. Curated by Caroline Evans and Nicola Hockley.
Murray’s approach to the exhibition theme focused on supply chains, natural resources and labour conditions. From locations and industries where materials are sourced, through refinement and manufacture, to marketing and purchasing, supply chains display a complex interlinking of human toiling, movement and migration, materials and commodities.
The works Territories, Interludes I and II and Weighted Drawing evoke chains and linkages, boundaries and border crossings.
Tumbleweed
University College, Oxford
2020
A drifting sculpture exploring themes of migration and movement.
Created during residency as Visitor in the Creative Arts at University College, Oxford.
Hopscotch Tango: A Game of Interdisciplinary Dance
Radcliffe Quad, University College, Oxford
2019
Footsteps and lines in coloured chalk marked the flagstone walkway of Radcliffe Quad. Toward the centre the footsteps lay out the patterns of the dance tango, while at either end the lines mark out the childhood game of hopscotch. Instead of using standard formats, the hopscotch courts draw inspiration from maths and poetry: the court at one end relates to Pascal’s triangle, and at the other, the rhyme scheme of the sonnet “Ozymandias’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley, a notable alumnus of University College.
Hopscotch Tango playfully points to the interrelations between games and competition, historical contexts and new narratives, sets and structures, boundaries and innovation.
Created during residency as Visitor in the Creative Arts at University College, Oxford.
Wakefield Cathedral
2019
Designed through collaboration with dancers, these works define physical spaces for bodies to inhabit and interact with. But they also portray an emotional territory of feelings and experiences. In a media driven era of polished images and seemingly effortless achievement, Awkward Objects refreshingly celebrate the ungraceful, inconvenient or disconcerting - in other words,real moments of life full of efforts and imperfections.
Awkward Objects were presented in performance with dancers Bar Groisman, Ashlin Huck, Joke Swennen and Beth Conellan.
Commissioned by Index Visual Arts Festival, a fringe festival of Yorkshire Sculpture International 2019
2017
Cambridge
Stasis: A temporary state of inactivity resulting from a static balance between opposing forces.
Created from ice, steel and glass, these structures evoke tensions between volcanic and glacial forces in Iceland, where humans coexist in an inherently unstable landscape.
Stasis is part of Danger, an emerging four-part series of studio and environmental installations exploring the sense of precarious resilience with which humans relate to physical environments and to each other around the globe. Each installation -Stasis (Iceland), Shift (China), Power (Istanbul), Collapse (New Mexico)- considers a distinct geopolitical location, focusing on different materials and modes of audience interactions.
2018
Heong Gallery, Downing College Cambridge
ArtSpace, Cambridge
Shift: to move or cause to move; a slight change in position, direction, or tendency
With participative and repositional works in clay and wood, Shift takes inspiration from China, and human traces imprinted on the land. The wooden blades take their form from stone age ceremonial jade blades, while the hollow ceramic forms evoke both weathered river stones, and clay vessels.
Shift is part of Danger, an emerging four-part series of studio and environmental installations exploring the sense of precarious resilience with which humans relate to physical environments and to each other around the globe. Each installation -Stasis (Iceland), Shift (China), Power (Istanbul), Collapse (New Mexico)- considers a distinct geopolitical location, focusing on different materials and modes of audience interactions.
Ongoing- - 2018
Power: the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behaviour of others or the course of events.
An unfolding body of work with steel shards and curves developed as a result of collaborations with dancers from Cambridge Contemporary Dance.
Power is part of Danger, an emerging four-part series of studio and environmental installations exploring the sense of precarious resilience with which humans relate to physical environments and to each other around the globe. Each installation -Stasis (Iceland), Shift (China), Power (Istanbul), Collapse (New Mexico)- considers a distinct geopolitical location, focusing on different materials and modes of audience interactions.
2016
The Undercroft, Norwich
Royal Society of Sculptors, London
Full of charge and potential, the spiky shards of laser cut steel have links to the drawn line, to domestic or utilitarian tools, to weaponry. Ambiguously bound with bubble wrap and bungee cord, or arranged in contrast with brittle, hollow plaster boulders, these works hold a sense of threat and allure in precarious balance.
2016
Victoria Eugenia Theater, San Sebastian, Spain
A multidisciplinary performance created by Melissa Pierce Murray and Diana Scarborough for the DIPC Passion for Knowledge science festival in San Sebastian, Spain. Featuring dancers from the Basque dance company Dantzaz.
2015
Norwich University of the Arts
Anteroom Gallery, Norwich
These works combine approaches to drawing, choreography and materiality to create three-dimensional improvisational arrangements.
2015
Norwich University of the Arts
This work explores ideas through using a ‘sculpture kit’ of pre-fashioned elements to construct, perform and photograph objects or spaces of ambiguous scale. Some ideas are realized in permanent or public manifestations, leading to questions of where the artwork lies: in the words, the object, the photographic trace, the action of construction or the interaction with an audience.
2014
Cromer Beach, Norfolk
Exploring an environment with a Sculpture Kit of pre-fashioned sculptural elements.
2014
Norwich University of the Arts
matrix /meitriks/ n.
1 the physical, cultural, social or political environment in which something is bred, produced or developed.
2 a) a mass of fine grained rock in which gems, crystals or fossils are embedded. b) any relatively fine or homogeneous substance in which coarser or larger particles are embedded.
3 a mould in which something (such as an engraving or record) is cast or shaped.
4 a grid-like arrangement of elements, a lattice.
5 Math. An array of symbols or mathematical expressions arranged in a rectangle of rows and columns, treated as a single entity.
2015
Stew Gallery, Norwich
2000
Portsmouth Cathedral
Body
1999
Hampshire Sculpture Trust, Winchester
