From issue: #13 The Graduate Issue 2021
This is how she lives on
Marianne McGurk’s practice incorporates everyday found objects to create extraordinary, often-absurd portraits, landscapes and still lifes. In This is how she lives on, the artist explores her grief about her mother’s death through her collection of lipsticks. McGurk works with memory and ephemera in an attempt to capture the essence of the person her mother was. At its core, this project is anchored in loss and trauma, but it also incorporates broader concepts of absence, motherhood, beauty, fragility and metamorphosis. This is how she lives on is a memorial to McGurk’s mother, a continuation of the relationship that bonded them. The photographs function as visual memory, a tangible form to hold onto.
Marianne McGurk (born 1977) crafts props, characters and scenarios to create new narratives and stories. She is interested in individual lived experiences and the instants when people connect with each other and their environment – those sometimes-surreal, un-spectacular, fleeting, in-between moments – as well as how people deal with the inevitability of life and death. She graduated in 2021 with an MA in photography from the University of Central Lancashire.
Marianne McGurk was awarded the spectrum printing voucher.
