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" I can't get enough of Scottish artist Pinkie Maclure's stained glass works"

 Brian Boucher, ARTNET 2025​​

"It’s both monumental and irreverent, elevating the humble art of gardening, while thumbing its nose at the grandiose history of the medium."

Susan Mansfield****Scotsman 2023

"This is unexpected."  Alastair Sooke, The Telegraph, 2024

"Like the radical craft and social commentary in Grayson Perry’s work, which has transformed perception of ceramics beyond the functional or decorative, Maclure elevates stained glass to a whole new level. " Georgina Coburn 2020

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Pinkie Maclure (b. 1961) is a Scottish artist and musician who grew up in a fishing village in the north-east of Scotland. She was a prolific child artist,  but the bullying of her art teacher at secondary school led her to give up art until some years later. 

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After spending 20 years building and repairing conventional architectural stained glass for churches and houses to supplement her income as a touring and recording musician, she grew frustrated by narrow consumer expectations (as indeed she had with the music industry) and rebelled, determined to save a great allegorical medium from becoming merely background music.

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This led her back to drawing and painting, but this time on glass.

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Drawing on the urgent, dark, chaotic beauty of early cathedral glass while gleefully subverting its religious symbolism, she now uses multiple advanced techniques to make stained glass light boxes, large installations, ambisonic 3D sound, live, sung performances and stained glass sculptures.

Pinkie’s first solo exhibition, ‘Lost Congregation’, took place at CCA Glasgow in 2023.  ‘The Soil’, her 3m x 2.5m stained glass installation celebrating urine-stimulated compost-making to save the earth’s vanishing soil, dominated the main gallery, transforming it into a church haunted by its lost congregation. The show also featured a moving 3D sound installation written by Pinkie and Scotland’s first live ambisonic performances, created and performed by Pinkie with sound scenographer John Wills.

Pinkie’s 2nd solo exhibition ‘Earthly Spirits’, took place in Spring 2026 at East Quay Watchet, Somerset.

“Beauty Tricks” (2017) explores the beauty industry and its destructive effects on women, girls and the natural environment.  It won the Zealous Craft Award and hangs in the pubic collection of the National Stained Glass Museum, Ely in 2024.

‘Pills for Ills, Ills for Pills’ won the 2020 John Byrne Award for its portrayal of opiate addiction.

‘Self-Portrait Dreaming of Portavadie’ (2019), held in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Scotland, recalls her grandfather’s cottage in a remote corner of Argyll, a much-loved place that was blown up and obliterated by a government-sponsored oil company when she was 11.  This early awakening to humanity's self-destructive tendencies still informs much of her work today.

Pinkie lives and works in an extended caravan in the Scottish rainforest.
 

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