One of the most captivating contemporary artists in Scotland must be Pinkie Maclure, who brings storytelling and relevance to the ancient art of stained glass. She is also one of the most rapidly ascending, with an exhibition planned in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in 2026 and a large commission due for their new Dundee space.
The power of stained glass was originally, literally, intended to bring light into a dark place. In the gloom of a chapel, stained glass told stories to people who couldn’t read words, or where The Word was only read by a few. The colour and light of stained glass, and especially its silence, creates a trinity that helps to open us new fairytales and truth-seeking stories. We are hard-wired to pursue these narratives and Maclure’s quite sandblasted, painted and layered and assembled glass fragments provide them.
In X-ray Eyes (opposite,) the engraved glass contains scraps of text, and what Maclure calls ‘hidden worlds.’ Two doll-like characters, ‘fire’ and ‘flood’ are part of the same story, part of the equilibrium but also part of the chaos. A fascination for Maclure is how historic stained-glass windows are repeatedly repaired using whatever scraps of glass are available, burying old stories within new ones, and adding to the layered richness seen in historic stained glass today. Cracks and chaos, Maclure believes, only make work richer, and make us stare harder at the final piece.
Maclure’s work is also utterly relevant to modern lives and the paradoxes we face in the early twenty-first century, and this is done without the nostalgia and decoration often associated with stained glass. Dark subjects – opioid addiction and big pharma (Pills for ills,) Shopping addiction (Black Friday and the Ghosts of Thrift,) the beauty industry (Beauty Tricks) and the environment (Exit Tree, Un Eezee Kleen) amongst many other vital and ugly subjects tackled by Maclure, but somehow the results are always beautiful to look at. There is often a joy in a small thing that can only be seen close up, existing in a small niche - the ant in a layer behind the nestling’s nest for example.
It is hard not to comment on Maclure’s dark and provocative humour and I am sure there is a wry smile as they are composed on her lightbox and sketch pad. The pre-Christian deity Dualchas (Bridgid in Dualchas, 2022) has her own dark hedge that men are forbidden to cross. She will protect nature and her hedge with unbridled force. Seagulls fight back in Fish and Chips and, in Beauty Tricks, the long-haired Rapunzel figure vomits bulimically to keep her figure trim. There is also the profound and mystic in Maclure’s world. Here, angels whisper universal music into your ears, Goddesses and non-human forces stand above us and our follies. In dark places, greater forces shine and Maclure, through her work, Maclure brings light.
