Pinkie Maclure: Telling Stories of Our Time Through Traditional Stained Glass

An artist using the allegorical power of medieval stained glass as a vehicle for contemporary expression, Pinkie Maclure marries traditional craft techniques with a radically different aesthetic. Stained glass was invented in the 12th century to communicate to a largely illiterate population, its vivid colors having a seductive quality that’s hard to resist. However, its narrative role has been largely abandoned in recent years, which is something Maclure hopes to change through her architectural installations and highly-detailed stained glass light boxes that reflect her commentary on the modern world around us. 

Maclure states: “My goal is to seduce the eye, but crucially, to deal with contemporary subject matter, telling darkly humorous stories from modern life.” 

For example, in her piece Beauty Tricks, the artist questions interpretations of beauty and a multitude of thorny contradictions. Her central figure is based around a classic Madonna, but she has liposuction lines on her torso and hypodermic needles and scalpels adorning her halo. Her nipples have been censored. Two little girls gaze up at her beautiful pink frock from a grey world of abandoned plastic containers. A woman fires a gun at a mirror, smashing it to smithereens. To her left, a grandmother knits a web of Barbie dolls and to her right is a bulimic Rapunzel. The palm trees refer to the palm oil industry; the roses symbolize feminine beauty. At the top, Satan is hopping across the towers of Oxbridge with a pile of books heaped on his back, stealing all the knowledge while the women are distracted. This work was acquired by the Stained Glass Museum for the national collection of stained glass and is now on permanent display in Ely Cathedral.

Maclure was raised in a small fishing town in the northeast of Scotland by an atheist mother, a talented musician who loved to sing sacred music. A prolific child artist, she drew on old wallpaper samples in front of the television every night, but was later put off by a sexist art teacher and turned to music and performance instead. As a singer-songwriter, she has recorded 10 albums over 30 years and performed internationally.

To support her music career, after 25 years of depending on low-paying jobs, Maclure found work helping a friend in a commercial stained glass studio. It was not very creative, however, she did start to study the history of stained glass and became disheartened by what she saw as the contemporary dumbing down of this extraordinary medium.

She says: “I noticed that many churches now avoid using any imagery and that fewer stained glass artists have the very particular skills required to paint images on glass. In contrast with the heady, dazzling power of figurative medieval glass, many 20^th-century stained glass windows had become simple blocks of cheap, colored glass, often designed and mass-produced by glaziers, with no artistic intent behind them – their function was reduced to something purely physical; a kind of upmarket net curtain.”

​Maclure decided to develop her painting, sandblasting and engraving skills in order to harness the spiritual power of stained glass, exploring the big issues of today such as climate, women’s rights, addiction and grassroots activism. Instead of removing the images, she changes them. Her references include bible stories, folklore, tabloid newspaper headlines and personal experiences. She uses stained glass as a language, as they did in the Middle Ages.

“I love the peculiar character of very old, broken windows, which have been repaired many times over the centuries. They have a particular poignancy which reminds us of our mortality and the fragility of the earth.” 

​For Maclure’s 2023 solo exhibition at CCA Glasgow, Lost Congregation, she combined large-scale stained glass, 3D sound, film and live performance, to create a fictional, abandoned rural chapel, haunted by its lost congregation. This multi-media installation questions our relationship with the land and celebrates the way nature and grassroots activism, such as compost-making, can reclaim abandoned places. The show attracted record numbers to the venue and was extended by a month.

Scotsman review of the exhibition;

https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/art/art-reviews-monster-chetwynd-pinkie-maclure-nicolas-party-cathy-wilkes-jala-wahid-4222378

The central work in the show, The Soil was a room-sized installation evoking an abandoned chapel where ivy grows up the sides of the old pews and the wind whistles through the broken door. At one end is a resplendent stained-glass window featuring a woman gardener, hands clasped in a secular prayer, urinating on her compost heap (human urine being an ideal activator of compost). A soundscape of whispers, children’s voices and snatches of song adds to the atmosphere. It’s both monumental and irreverent, elevating the humble pursuit of gardening while thumbing its nose at the grandiose history of the medium. While concerns about vanishing communities, climate change and damage done to topsoil by intensive farming are all present in this work, there is also a businesslike cheerfulness to the welly-wearing modern saint and her no-nonsense pursuit of her purpose. The Soil was subsequently on display at Two Temple Place, London, from January 27 – April 21, 2024.

In the collection of the National Museum of Scotland and recently exhibiting at Homo Faber (Venice), Collect (London), the Outsider Art Fair (New York) and the John Ruskin Prize (Manchester), Maclure has been the recipient of a number of awards, including the Sequested Prize, John Byrne Prize, Zealous Craft Prize and Jerwood Makers. Her work Two Witches (Knowledge is Power) was selected for publication in the 2024 issue of New Glass Review, the Corning Museum of Glass’ survey of cutting-edge glass. Two Witches was also on view at the John Ruskin Prize group exhibition at Trinity Buoy Wharf, Poplar, London back in February. The National Museum of Scotland acquired Self-Portrait Dreaming of Portavadie in 2021. Maclure plans a solo show at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in the near future.

​“I find medieval stained glass bewitching and daring… I want to elevate the medium into a contemporary art form, using its seductive beauty and historical associations to stimulate debate and to tell my own stories.”