Beauty Tricks 120cm x 60cm ( 2017) Stained Glass light box

Permanent Collection, The Stained Glass Museum, Ely, UK.​

Detail

​

"In a fatally narcissistic world, 'Beauty Tricks' is a double edged sword that seduces and interrogates on multiple levels. From the smallest details to the grand design, we’re confronted by the contradictory nature of human desire. Maclure’s work challenges inherited self-loathing and  a status quo of unattainable perfection. At the base of the matter is a wasteland rendered in black and white. Finely etched brush marks define discarded bottles and tubes with labels of promise like ‘natural’ ‘fresh’ and ‘eternity’. Two small girls inhabit this ground of next generation, one pointing upwards towards the central female figure, a golden-haired deity/ goddess, with a tracery of nip/ tuck markings on her torso. A halo of scalpels and syringes glow in candy-like colours around her head, like a saintly fairground attraction. Her voluminous skirt reads like a mountain before the two children, adorned with heritage flock-like patterns. 

From a distance, Maclure’s luminous panel feels like a magical fairy tale with its dominant palette of pink and blue, accented with sunny yellow and fertile green. The goddess figure resembles a Pre-Raphaelite face of idealised beauty, part of the history and craft of 19th Century stained glass, inspired by high Gothic. However, any reference to the Pre- Raphaelite brotherhood  and their contentious ideals of feminine beauty quickly evaporate in the presence of Maclure’s female protagonists. She does something truly radical in Beauty Tricks, owning and subverting the internal female gaze. The self-reflection of  Maclure’s stained glass is a brilliant counterfoil for received ideas and assumptions about our own worth. Characteristically, the panel is invested with its own power of self-determination, in the stories we construct for ourselves. 

The intellect and vision in Maclure’s work are in perfect union with its aesthetic qualities. Above the goddess’s head floats scales of weighted judgement; ‘worth it’ or ‘not worth it’, echoing the advertising slogan of a well-known international beauty corporation. Our central deity is flanked on one side by a vomiting Rapunzel, inferring an eating disorder and on the other by a granny knitting a net of floating barbie dolls. However, the feelings these figures engender, of vulnerability and inevitable worship at the foot of false ideas/ gods is shattered by the spirited presence of a teenage girl suspended at the centre of a vortex. Bracing herself against the circle like James Bond or Lara Croft, she’s shooting the composition into positive and negative mirror shards. It’s the truth and lie embodied by that material as an instrument of judgement, exploded with youthful exuberance. "

Georgina Coburn, 2019

​

​

​