A solo exhibition of work by Wendy McMurdo, widely regarded as one of Scotland's leading contemporary artists, working in the field of photography and digital media. This is the first solo presentation of her work in Scotland since 1995, despite her prolific inclusion in group exhibitions and public collections throughout the UK and overseas. The exhibition consists of images from her on-ongoing series of images of children at play or learning, that has just returned from an exhibition at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, Greece supported by the British Council.
Wendy McMurdo's images hover between fact and fiction, representing moments of play or reverie where children are isolated from the adult world. McMurdo combines traditional photography and digital technology to create a deliberately Śout of sorts‚ space that acts like a phycological imprint of childhood memory. Her work references conventions in historical portrait painting and has the look of dramatic set pieces. McMurdo manipulates her images using digital techniques in order to focus on the emotional aspect of the subject, deliberately removing or emphasising certain elements to undermine the apparent objectivity of the photographic image.
Throughout the exhibition and over the coming months Wendy McMurdo will be researching and developing new work in collaboration with the youth music development programme at Tolbooth, Stirling's venue for music and arts. www.stirling.gov.uk/tolbooth
Wendy McMurdo was born in Edinburgh in 1962 and studied fine art painting at Edinburgh College of Art. In the mid 1980‚s she studied at the Pratt Institute in New York and completed her M.A at Goldsmiths College in London in 1993, when she was awarded a Henry Moore Foundation Research Fellowship. From 1998-2000 she was appointed Leverhulme Special Research Fellow at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee. Recent commissions include the Science Museum in London and The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh in association with the Roslin Institute, Edinburgh.
In 2001 the Centre for Photography in Salamanca, Spain published a monograph 'Wendy McMurdo' with essays by Francis McKee and Gilda Williams. Her work, and writings on her work, are included both in Phaidon's recent 'Art and Photography' and Thames and Hudso's 'Photography and Art' from the World of Art series. Her practice has been the subject of documentaries for BBC 2 and Channel 4 and is included in The British Library Sound Archive's Oral history of British Photography.
McMurdo is currently developing a major project entitled 'Wrecks of Scapa' inspired by WW1 wrecks of Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands. The project is supported by a Scottish Arts Council 'Creative Scotland' award from 2002 and a grant from NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts). Wendy McMurdo currently lives and works in Edinburgh and is represented by the Andrew Mummery Gallery, London.
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