Louise McRae has a fluid art and spatial sculpture practice encompassing many areas of the material world. An alchemist of materials, she transforms one form into another unexpected form, bringing a sense of wonder, intrigue, and hope. 

In her work, Louise McRae investigates our relationship to the object world.
She moves from bricolage paintings to reclaimed wood and pressed concrete sculptures and now with her new series, she has created sculptural combinations of brightly hued felt and warm beaten metals: brass, copper, alloy and enamel, abounding off the wall in a new perceptual space. 

The exhibition's title is borrowed from a book by conservation biologist Thor Hanson, ‘Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid: The Fraught and Fascinating Biology of Climate Change.’ This book is about adaptation and provides evidence that there are signs everywhere showing how animals and plants are responding to climate change. Some species are adapting, some are evolving and some are dying out. ‘Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid’ is a captivating story of new forms emerging and ways of coping with a changing environment, such as the Anole lizards having grown larger toe pads to grip more tightly in frequent hurricanes. Or how the warmer ocean waters have caused the Humboldt squid to evolve so drastically that they are mistaken for other species by fishermen. This is a story of hope and shows that plasticity is what saves us, being able to adapt to be resilient and risk all to do so. An ultimatum, change or face extinction. 

When McRae wrote to Hanson, seeking permission to use his title and enclosed images of her work he responded “gorgeous; fascinating at first glance and inviting closer scrutiny, much like the stories I was trying to convey in the book.” 

There is an element of punk in McRae’s practice arising from her irreverence for what materials are supposed to do and a revolt from classical sculpture. She makes material matter evolve... 

In defiance of what is expected, much in the way the Surrealist artists challenged reason and arranged found objects in bizarre combinations, McRae creates tensions between materials. Encountering the work elicits a physical and emotional response, far from one-dimensional (both in form and in content) and instead, it recalls unconscious sensations and sensual pleasures. 

There are aspects in McRae’s work that intersect with other historical art practices – yet she takes a renegade approach. We see a similarity to the assemblages of Rosalie Gascoigne and the interrelation of materials, colours and repetition. We see references to Cubism’s bricolage using a diverse range of non-traditional art materials. There is a strong relation to Dada, artists like Kurt Schwitters or Hannah Höch and their idiosyncratic forms of collage that combined ephemera of everyday life and unexpected materials combinations as McRae does. 

Aspects of McRae’s work have precedence in Jessica Stockholder’s installations from the late 1980s where she utilises the optically recessive and advancing properties of colour. Stockholder uses strong colours to flatten objects while also using three-dimensional space to expand colour and confuse where objects are in space. We see expansive use of colourful materials and techniques of folding and bending. 

One of McRae's favourite designers is Issey Miyake, his innovative use of fabric and drapery can be seen throughout this new series of works. She was deeply saddened to learn of his death while she was assembling Naturgemälde, which looks like the pleats of a Japanese kimono and which McRae has described as an ode to Miyake.

The tiny restrained pleats in works such as Pink Lizard balance the larger luxe extravagant folds of fabrics, the juxtaposition of one texture against another. The elegant pleats and folds, the lustre of the metals and the delicious fruit cocktail colours, contrasted with the underlying industrial or functional ‘working class’ materials – craft textile felt and copper. 

A powerful component of McRae’s practice is the use of humour and play. It is through humour that the ideal, or the classical form of sculpture or painting is deconstructed and McRae does this with great clarity. 

The playfulness is radical and destabilising,  it is a temporary loss of control and it challenges the sense of order and challenges us to look at things from a different perspective. In recent years our world has been disrupted as political and ecological systems we once thought were solid, are threatened and crumble around us. 

The bright bulbous forms of McRae’s Un-Monumental series (2018 – 2020) are replaced here with a playful elegance. Beguile is delicately balanced yet full of energy. Flat colours of felt rolled and folded contrasting with the shiny metallic ribbon of copper. There is an underlying fleshiness coming through like the lick of a tongue and paint is added for depth of colour and texture. 

The artist Sarah Lucas, who also employs the device of humour and play in her installations to disarm the viewers and their expectations, commented on humour “when humour happens things get good, less depressing ....”.

Humour can be an escape or a way to dream, a way of dealing with the reality of life. It is a powerful way of connecting the viewer with the artist's world making it more accessible. We are disarmed by the unusual, and the funny and McRae uses these tools to create forms that have great clarity, simplicity, and poetic power. 

These new works have a maximalist style yet also a restraint as they hover, stop and hold. Materials such as felt, brass, and copper are used outrageously, lavish opulent materials traditionally used in jewellery making. Here they are looped and folded, bursting, dropping down, and coming off the wall. The work has a corporeal element – like the body bending and rolling. 

There are visual puns at play here, contrasting binaries of hard and soft, stiff, and floppy, matt and shiny textures and a bright warm joyful colour palette.

A tumbling of material form is not letting the materials do what they want, this is a process of high manipulation. McRae scrutinises the material form – playing, toying,  bending and messing with it, exploring new frontiers and inspiring us to be challenged with a different way of being. 

The hurricane lizards and the plastic squid are adapting to a new order, McRae is challenging us, are we up to the ultimatum: can we evolve and adapt to an environment constantly in flux? 

Claire Ulenberg

August 2022