LORNA MURRAY

Encompassing art, design, costume and fashion, Lorna Murray’s creative practice is based in the transformation of materials, her textiles and found objects imbued with human experience and emotion. Referencing the past and present, Murray weaves together global cultural references, juxtaposing and layering hand worked cloth, found objects and post consumer waste to explore issues of recycling, feminine identity, urban culture and the body in relation to technology, mass production and consumerism.

Throughout Murray’s practice her bowerbird’s eye for beauty is evident. Above all her work is an experiment in the creation of beauty, divining the essence of what makes a thing beautiful and seeking it in the unconventional. Like spinning straw into gold, through Murray’s vision worthless detritus, found objects and cloth are transfigured into objects which speak of the beauty and significance in our everyday lives.
- Bryony Nainby


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Thematic threads running through Lorna Murray’s work include issues of contemporary culture, memory, identity, and place. There are also frequent references to the aesthetic extravagance of the baroque or rococo. The artist lures us into the intricate ornateness of her surfaces and structures with their dual associations of opulence and intimacy. Sometimes restrained but often flamboyant Murray manipulates the ornamental register across all her works whether assembled constructions, body sculptures or adornments.

Her pieces move between past and present combining processes from traditional textile production with incongruous materials and quotidian ephemera. The nostalgic suggestiveness in Murray’s art reminds us of the role of embellishment in our collective cultural history.
Another point of reference for this artist’s practice is Indian culture, particularly its employment of embellishment across a vast array of applications and its remarkable recycling ability. Murray’s work is an example of the successful transformation of banal materials. The visual transformation of everyday found materials into cloth-like constructions that conjure a spectrum of responses spanning childhood memories to the secretive, evocative, challenging or allusive aspects of human experience. One cannot simply peel ornament off the surface from Lorna Murray’s ornamentation - its essential role in her work manifests as a juncture between structural function and aesthetic embellishment and is deeply entrenched into its matrix. Her seductive art practice is an intelligent celebration of the decorative and the everyday.
- Pamela Gaunt