Falling and Rising
Residency and Engagement Workshops
Art House Wakefield 2021
During a week-long residency at Art House Wakefield I developed ideas for an interactive sculptural landscape, and ran workshops with community members including asylum seekers and persons with disabilities.
Since arriving in October, Melissa Pierce Murray, Univ’s Visitor in the Creative Arts, has sought to challenge preconceptions of what art is, and demonstrate ways in which artistic activity can be used. She has engaged with students, staff and academics through workshops, drop-in sessions, formal and informal conversations.
During Michaelmas term Melissa installed dramatic orange spikes on the Quads, small interactive sculptures in the libraries or on tables during formal halls, and worked with students and staff to make miniature wire tomtes which took up residence in corners about the College. She got students, academics and staff skipping and dancing the interdisciplinary Hopscotch Tango as they followed chalk-drawn footsteps along the walkway in Radcliffe Quad.
During Hilary term, she continued to support student interests and well-being, providing skills-based sessions such as casting and stencilling and leading weekly life drawing and drop-in Art Society sessions
In guided workshops Melissa helped students create sculptural Thinking Objects relating to their subject areas. Outcomes from the workshops with English Students were were exhibited during the English Subject dinner, where they were displayed alongside written statements about the research topics. Students and academics were inspired and enthused by the work: “It’s wonderful to use a different way of thinking, so refreshing, I came away with so many ideas!”
During Arts Week, Melissa worked with students in the College Bar to make large scale wall paintings, inspired by pop artist and social activist Keith Haring. Melissa papered the arches in the bar and during the evening worked alongside students including a physicist and a classicist, who incorporated their interests. One mural included physics equations and lecture notes, and the other included imagery of the gorgon Medusa from the Temple of Artemis. The response to the wall painting has been very enthusiastic.
Other Arts Week activities included stencil workshops in the JCR. Elizabeth Adams, the Librarian, also ran a letterpress printing workshop with Melissa inspired by the “Women at Univ” Anniversary at the Bodleian Library’s Bibliographic Press. A showcase of creative responses to 40 years of women at Univ was held in the College bar.
Melissa also ran the activities with academics via apothecary cast plaster bottles. The challenge was two-fold: first to paint something on the cast plaster bottle that related both to the object itself and to the academic’s area of research. The second challenge was to try to guess the meanings or ‘contents’ of the other painted bottles. Rather than a collection of medicines compiled according to crafted recipes and accurate measurements, these bottles represent a repository of different kinds of knowledge and experience.
Towards the end of the term, Melissa presented Tumbleweed, exploring themes of migration and movement through use of a reconfigurable sculpture which moved about the college.
As students said completed there studies and packed up on the last day of term
All year Melissa had to edit out the yellow fire hydrant plaque in my photos of sculptures in Radcliffe Quad. On the last day of the term, she made a playful response with ‘Ah Ha!’.
2018
Heong Gallery, Downing College, Cambridge
ArtSpace, Cambridge
Participative workshops exploring relationships between sculptural objects, bodies and environments.
Participants worked alongside the artist to create compositions using sculptural objects relating to human bodies and to natural environments. Included a discussion of artworks designed for interaction.
Part of the outreach programme for a permanent work of public art, ‘CORPUS’ by Dalziel + Scullion, that has been commissioned by the University of Cambridge for the new Capella building on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus.
Venues/Dates
Heong Gallery,
Saturday 8 September
11-1 pm
Cambridge Artworks
Sunday 16 September
2-4 pm
2018
University of Cambridge Science Festival
Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition, London
Developed and produced by Melissa Pierce Murray and NanoDTC researcher Philipp Koehler.
NanoVignettes is a series of micro-films presenting latest research from the EPSRC CDT in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (NanoDTC), in an inventive and accessible visual format. NanoDTC students and associates were paired with MA-level artists, and together these teams explored crossovers between their disciplines. Scientists introduced the artists to their labs and research, and the artists then created dialogues and imagery to explain their understanding of the scientists’ work. The micro-films communicate their shared understandings, across unusual divergences in ideas, language, and idiom. By harnessing the creativity of scientists and artists working together, the videos speak to wide audiences on many levels.
Including artists working across many media, and at various stages in their careers, the videos explain scientific concepts using a plethora of imaginative and off-the-wall approaches, from drawing and animation, to 3D constructions. Artists include MA students from Central Saint Martins, Norwich University of the Arts, and Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University, alongside three professional artists and one sixth form student.
NanoVignettes was presented at the University of Cambridge Science Festival and formed an online part of the NanoDTC’s exhibit ‘Mind the Nano Gap’ at the Royal Society Summer Exhibition in London from 2-8 July 2018.
2018
ESPRC Centre for Doctoral Training in NanoScience and NanoTechnology, University of Cambridge
Working across several universities (Norwich University of the Arts, The College of Art and Design, Anglia Ruskin University, and the University of Cambridge NanoDTC), Murray writes and delivers the series of interdisciplinary creativity workshops entitled Drawing on Science.
Drawing on Science is a programme of creativity workshops exploring ways in which artistic thinking and skills be utilized to enhance scientific communication and research. The series enables science PhD candidates to develop their awareness of visual language and presentation through a series of outcome-focused activities: participating in ‘making sessions’ with presentations by artists and scientists, investigative collaborations with MA level art and design students, and the development of scientific posters and other outreach materials.
2018
Intellectual Forum, Jesus College, Cambridge
Cambridge Science Festival
Advances in science provide the means to probe matter on increasingly minute and vast scales, expanding human senses and calling into question what it means to know and perceive. As we learn more about the materials and forces which shape our world, we piece together data and thought using a variety of approaches—mathematics, models and metaphors—to develop our understanding and enable us to describe and communicate our ideas.
On 17 March 2018, the Intellectual Forum hosted an interactive workshop for the Cambridge Science Festival, wherein participants created three dimensional drawings using a process of thinking with objects with sculptor Melissa Pierce Murray. Participants explored questions and example relating to how artists and scientists develop conceptual and physical metaphors to make sense of the world.
The workshop also included a discussion of Murray’s collaborative work with artists and scientists, showing how her sculptures draw on the disciplines of physics, poetry and art.
2018
Scott Polar Institute
Display of Stasis and Ice Carving Workshop for the Polar Sensory Open Day at the Polar Museum. Part of the University of Cambridge Science Festival 2018.
2015
University Cambridge Festival of Ideas
Into Boundless Space I Leap, Curated by Kettles Yard for the Maxwell Centre, Cambridge
NanoArt brought together established artists and emerging scientists to engage in creative cross-disciplinary investigations at the nanoscale.
With structures that are smaller than a thousandth of a human hair, the nanoscale is a domain where bulk properties and atomistic characteristics of materials are both in evidence, and raises deep questions on how we perceive, interpret and make sense of materials and interactions that are very far from everyday human experience and physical realities.
Through sharing conceptual approaches, physical locations and technical processes, the collaborations explored themes of perception, scale and self-assembly at the nanoscale.
Presentations and displays emerging from initial cross-disciplinary investigations, seeding ideas for further research and exchange, were shown to the public at the Nano^Art@CambridgeFestival of Ideas 2015 event: Perceiving on the Smallest Scales.
Coordinated by Melissa Pierce Murray and Dr. KarishmaJain of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (NanoDTC)
Small Public Commissions
2014 Chesterton Community College, Cambridge
2013 Rosie Maternity Garden, Addenbrooks Hospital, Cambridge
2000 Eastleigh City Council, Hampshire
Selected Private Commissions
1999- 2014
