Artist of the Month, August 2023 - Grace McMurray

Grace McMurray lives between Rathfriland and Belfast in the North of Ireland. She studied Fine Art Sculpture (BA) at Wimbledon College of Art, graduating in 2008. She is a member of Array Collective who won the Turner Prize 2021 and exhibits internationally and nationally. Grace uses drawing, patchwork, knitting, weaving and installation to question stereotypes of gendered spaces and social conditioning in the public imagination.

Portal is part of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s art collection. The piece was made for the Irish Modernisms Show at CCA Derry in 2019 and took three years to create. Glitter ribbon has been woven in three different directions with alternating patterns, to create a fabric wall. The piece questions the contrast between space and the value of work and references the collective memory of the public realm and high art as masculine, as opposed to the feminine sphere of the private, and undervalued forms of craft. It questions the relationship between the digital and the handmade. Portal is body height taking on elements of self-portraiture, interrupting the binaries of self and the domestic, taking up space that has not been afforded due to class and gender.

Further information about Grace and her work can be found at www. gracemcmurray.com