Louise McRae

Louise McRae’s new works respond to both our natural and built environments. She weaves strips of sheet metal and felt together with timber into undulating wall-hung sculptures. A love for her media and processes are evident throughout: materials are intertwined in gentle folds and pleats or hammered and clamped into submission. The works are painted in vibrant monochrome with textural contrasts allowing the natural characteristics of each material to shine through. McRae pushes her structures to the brink collapse, highlighting their physicality and the tensions which simultaneously hold them together and threaten to pull them apart.

McRae's previous practice involved painting upon scrap timber, which she then split into shards and reassembled into matrices of varying shapes and formats. Though the physical labor involved in making these works was undeniable, the works also had a quality of self-generation: shards congregated and tessellated as though they had floated into their respective positions. The works swelled with movement and color.