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Passing Fancy: Susie MacMurray, 'Here come the Girls'
Occasional piece mooching around Manchester spotting things we find interesting
This is a big chandelier of wineglasses rimmed with lipstick at Manchester Art Gallery. It's by Susie MacMurray who uses installations and sculpture made from a variety of materials to suit the work. She's used human hair, balloons and bird feathers and in this instance plastic glasses.
Manchester-based MacMurray's work is in response to the Angels of Anarchy exhibition of art by women surrealists showing elsewhere in the gallery. The latter exhibition finishes on Sunday 10 January so get along there if you've not been. MacMurray's work will hang around until February.
MacMurray says of her installation: 'While thinking of strong women, femininity and power I couldn't help remember the Boots TV commercials with crowds of women getting excited and glammed up with make up and marching out to celebrate to the catchy tune of 'Here come the Girls' by the Sugababes. I hope visitors will find this work beautiful and celebratory. It is intended to encourage thought on how female empowerment is now perceived, its various guises – cultural/political/sexual as well as the ways women choose to exercise it, the ambiguities it throws up and the psychological bargains we strike with ourselves.'
It is a beautiful work, enjoyable simply as a clever and uplifting object, as well as a basis for the internal debate. You can find it in the foyer behind Manchester Art Gallery shop.
Passing Fancy will be an occasional article about anything which attracts our attention as we wander the city.
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Here Come The Girls was originally by Ernie K Doe, and covered by Sugababes. Love from Pedants' Corner.
I too miss the wonderful Italian chandeliers from Terminal One. They mesmerised me as a child. Whatever happened to them? Surely they would be a great addition to one of our cultural centres. Pumphouse, MoSI, City Art Gallery, or maybe in the lobby of the new Library Theatre when it moves into the Theatre Royal. Come on Man Con - get the Airport to release them into the community from whatever warehouse they're packed up in.
Actually they are real glasses, not plastic... more authentic and more of a sense of danger!
Flic thanks. You should do an intelligent cover called 'Here come the brains' with lots of sexy women sashaying into a library where they sit still and silently and read something worthwhile by Jeremy Bentham or some such.
Susie MacMurray is that you? Are they really real glasses? In which case well done in this H&S twisted world.
That work looks a bit like those wonderful chandaliers they had in Manchester Airport in Terminal One years ago. The ones that cost a bomb from that Italian designer. I'm going to visit and see whether I'm bargaining psychologically.
I really like Susie MacMurray's stuff. Anybody see that big floncey dress made from balloons. Wow.
E we're fools ta. Subeditors off. Changed in two moments.
Nice to see a new series of articles, but the pedant in me has to point out that it's spelt chandelier, not with two as. Oh, and it's Sugababes, not Sugarbabes.
Yep, they're real glasses.