Taking inspiration from the natural phenomenon of a starling murmuration—in which thousands of agile birds move en-masse to form a spectacular, choreographed aerial displays—MURMUR evokes the tight, synchronized, and constantly shifting patterns seen at dusk before roosting. The iridescent edges of intricately patterned pheasant feathers echo the swirling motion of starlings in flight.

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MccGwire’s work uses the language of nature’s forms to construct impossible creatures, pitting the beauty of a bird in flight against our instinctive revulsion to these unnatural forms in close proximity. Their feathers are both alluring and abject, and appeal to our subjective experience as we confront the breathless, convoluted structures. Her sculptures exist in the periphery between the living and the dead, challenging our perceptions of the authentic and the imaginary, they evoke

the combination of our fascination with the glorious iridescent, exotic specimens on display and the desire to look closer in spite of the disquieting atmosphere they create. 

MccGwire’s working process is a continuous cycle of collection and construction that manifests in the objects she creates. We take pleasure in the painstaking process of their development, apparent in the layers of carefully aligned feathers and in each swirl of iridescent plumage.  This creative process is central to MccGwire’s work, allowing the organic materials to suggest their own form and following their patterns to evoke movement and musculature in the sculptures themselves. Taking natural materials and reimagining their forms, MccGwire’s works take on an anthropomorphic quality; a brooding, predatory physicality that at once attracts with its perfection and beauty but also repels the viewer in equal measure.

MccGwire’s avian structures appear rooted in the aesthetic of natural history, taking on its associations of intellectual dominance, decadence and display. The pieces adopt the qualities of their material – appropriating the abject signification of bird feathers to create hybrids. Lifeless wings seem poised to take flight yet remain tethered, their momentum restrained, giving the sculptures a seething, serpentine quality. The culture of display is also key to the works, exploiting the perverse attraction to possess the abject and unfamiliar creature, and to frame it within a culture driven by aesthetic hierarchy. As MccGwire describes her pieces, they represent something ‘both sensual and deviant in equal measure’.

Seductive yet unsettling hybrid sculpture causes us to look more closely and to examine our relationship to such quotidian materials. Though they appear disturbing and unfamiliar at first glance, there is something strangely recognisable about their form – their creases and crevices seem somehow bodily, allowing us to identify some small part of ourselves in the sculptures. MccGwire’s work recontextualises natural materials, creating an impossible menagerie of writhing forms that expose both the beauty and darkness of nature, and reflect our own fears and vulnerability in their swelling shadows.