Louise Joséphine Bourgeois

Louise Joséphine Bourgeois was a renowned French-American artist and sculptor, best known for her contributions to both modern and contemporary art, and for her spider structures, titled Maman, which resulted in her being nicknamed the Spiderwoman. She is recognized today as the founder of confessional art. Though her works are abstract, they are suggestive of the human figure and express themes of betrayal, anxiety, and loneliness.

She famously stated “My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.” Deeply symbolic, her work uses her relationship with her parents and the role sexuality played in her early family life as a vocabulary in which to understand and remake that history. The anthropomorphic shapes her pieces take—the female and male bodies are continually referenced and remade—are charged with sexuality and innocence and the interplay between the two.

Susie Macmurray

Susie MacMurray’s work encompasses drawing, sculpture and architectural installations. A former classical musician, she retrained as an artist, graduating with an MA in Fine Art in 2001. She now has an international exhibition profile and shows regularly in the US and Europe as well as the UK.

Working in installation and sculpture, she has gained a reputation for site-specific interventions in historic spaces. Her work frequently refer ences the history of a space and seeks to merge the particularities of that history, the specifics of site, and the inherent references attached to materials in an attempt to gain insight into the relationship between place and people.

For more on Susie Mac-Murray, visit www.susie-macmurray.co.uk.