"Gathering" is a major new site-specific work by artist Susie MacMurray to be installed at Tatton Park. MacMurray is known for her large-scale immersive installations that combine meticulous detail with a sense of spectacle and drama. Here thousands of individual elements of red velvet and barbed wire are suspended in Tatton Park’s grand rotunda to create a performative space that draws the viewer in.
MacMurray’s work often reflects on the nature of memories, mortality, loss and our physical bodies. In "Gathering," each individual element suggests the imperfection of the body as the artist reflects on her own relationship with death and the precariousness of life. The work is in part a response to her husband’s death from cancer, and the many elements that make up the work have been made by MacMurray in collaboration with volunteers from East Cheshire Hospice.
Inspired in part by the history and the architecture of Tatton Park, "Gathering" will cascade like Spanish moss from the rotunda creating a theatrical installation that is both fragile and aggressive, confronting issues of beauty, pain, vulnerability and the ephemeral nature of life.