Mary Muir - MA Fine Art
‘But home is an island like this to me. And I come to this island to get to the very centre of the world.’
Roni Horn, 2020
Through her multidisciplinary practice, Mary Muir investigates embodied connection with place, exploring themes including temporality, memory and materiality. Her current focus is North Ronaldsay, the most northerly of 70 islands which form the Orkney archipelago, and her birthplace. Here, in this remote, seabound world, are dizzying scales of difference from ancient micro worlds to awe-inspiring planetary and oceanic vastness, the hyperlocal to the global and everything in between. Here also are the resonant tracks and traces of more than 6000 years of human presence.
Combining walking, photography, textile practice and printmaking, she explores the island’s rich and fragile maritime environment, its biodiversity, deep time geology and its equally rich and distinctive cultural heritage. Recently, she has been developing work using wool from the North Ronaldsay sheep, an ancient breed which live on the shore and eat seaweed. As well as being ecologically and culturally ethical, the wool has extraordinary haptic and sensory qualities and as a material directly reflects the elemental island ecology – a potent material embodiment of place and a direct manifestation of our ancient interconnectedness with the ‘more-than-human’ world around us. Regenerative and biodegradable, wool is hugely rich in cultural resonance and symbolism.
She was recently awarded a Textile Society Postgraduate Student Bursary to support the further development of her practice.
Mary lives in Derbyshire. She is a trustee of arts charity, Arts Derbyshire and a member of High Peak Borough Council Culture Strategy Advisory Group.
