Grace McMurray – Woven Polyhedra

Venue: Belfast School of Art, York Street, Belfast, BT15 1ED

A polyhedra is an eternal form used to consider symmetry, perspective and mathematical beauty.

Grace McMurray’s work is a process of making and remaking geometric digital patterns. She incorporates the use of patchwork, weaving, etching, embroidery, and delicate drawings. These labour intensive processes allow an intimate and fragile relationship to form between the art, the viewer and herself as the artist. Each stitch or line is a mark, that initiates patterns and in turn associations. Each colour pattern evokes the 3D within the 2D, organic structures become ornate, craft based with a fine art context.

In an essay accompanying the exhibition, Lucie McLaughlin observes: “Instead of conceptualising or attempting to classify McMurray’s work, its unalloyed colour, material control and subject implies formalism balanced with a disintegration through human influence. Where at first the viewer may understand a need for perfection and mathematical beauty, the material choices; stiff yarns, wide ribbon and graphite, drawn marks ‘that tell of process, time and concentration’ reflect imperfectly in flickering lines a ‘tremor of form,’ like the frayed ends of Ode To Irma Blank or the uneven ink surfaces in Blue Cutcomb. Using mathematics as a process of drawing, and a reconstituting of drawing as process to practice, McMurray’s ‘interaction between mind and object, or idea’ arranges the components of mental fabric directed at the impossibility of imagining a fixed goal, therefore uncovering an abstract completeness or absolute.”