Melissa Pierce Murray

An experimental piece of Performance + Sculpture

Cambridge Junction

2025

I like making things, thinking in a physical, non-verbal space.

I felt it possible to use words, particularly not my own words, to create this performance with sculptures on stage.

Using words in combination with my objects, I am searching for moments of friction and illumination, attraction or resistance…where the mind sparks.

Trespassers

Lovebrook Community Farm

South Downs National Park

2024

The law locks up the man or woman

Who steals the goose from off the common

But leaves the greater villain loose

Who steals the common from off the goose.

— Anonymous, "The Goose and the Common" late 18th cent

Rachael Nicholson, Jane Sarre, Melissa Pierce Murray with guest artist Steve Bannatyne invite you to Lovebrook Community Farm for this exhibition and sculpture trail asking the question, Who owns the rights to the land?

Inspired by literature including, The Book of Trespass (Nick Hayes), Wanderlust (Rebecca Solnit) and The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible (Charles Eisenstein), our works explore ideas related to the the historical theft/enclosure of common land and the perceived authority of ‘private property’.

As you wander through the barns and fields of Lovebrook Farm, join us in conversations on themes of land ownership, usage and access.

‘If walking sews together the land that ownership tears apart, then trespassing does so as a political statement.’

—Rebecca Solnit, from ‘Wanderlust’

On the Edge

Ovada Gallery, Oxford

2024

An exhibition of works by members of the Royal Society of Sculptors, made at a time when the world is on the edge.

Greek Tragedy

Cambridge Artworks and Wandlebury Country Park

2024

Sculptures created for in situ: theatre for an outdoor performance of Euripides Greek Tragedy, ‘The Bacchae’.

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.

Wakefield Cathedral

2019

View Video

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

Temporarily installed in the Antarctic by Hannah Laeverenz Schlogehofer while on the Homeward Bound leadership initiative for woman scientists.

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.

View Video

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