Programme 2: Wendy McMurdo - Photographic dreamscapes

Background Information

Born in 1962, Wendy grew up in Edinburgh and always wanted to be an artist. As a child, she was torn between art and ballet and she received a scholarship from Scottish Ballet. She chose to attend Edinburgh College of Art in 1980, where she studied fine art painting, although it wasn’t until she left art school in 1985 that she felt comfortable about calling herself an artist. She stopped painting and drawing twelve years ago when, after a two-year period spent living and studying printmaking in New York, she became interested in photography.

One of her major influences is film and moving picture; especially work by film directors like Martin Scorcese in the US and Powell and Pressburger in Great Britain. Earlier, as a schoolgirl, she had become fascinated by surrealism, often visiting the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, then in the Botanical Gardens, Edinburgh. There she first became familiar with artists such as Max Ernst, Hannah Hoch and Picasso.

Wendy gets her inspiration from a wide variety of sources; fiction and filmmaking are two major influences. The work of American photographer, Michael Light, has been of recent relevance to her. Light worked alongside NASA to produce a series of images from the archive brought back by the astronauts on all of the Apollo moon missions. The resulting photographic publication of these expeditions is called ‘Full Moon’. Wendy loves the idea of photographers working with scientists and technology to create an amalgam of these two very different areas, and she is currently developing a project to image the sub-sea wrecks in Scapa Flow in Orkney.

Wendy compares her digital photography to surrealist collage in many ways. The idea of adding one surface on top of another is more akin to painting or printmaking than to traditional photography.

In the mid-1990s Wendy became particularly interested in the then-evolving medium of digital media. In 1993, with the assistance of a Henry Moore Foundation Fellowship, she produced a ground- breaking body of work called ‘In a Shaded Place’, which examined the impact of digital technologies on traditional representational photography.

Currently, she is developing work that examines the ways in which technological developments in the bio-medical sciences in particular affect our view of ourselves. Her latest commission is for The Science Museum in London and The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh in association with the Roslin Institute, Edinburgh. Wendy is currently working on another commission for the National Portrait Gallery, recording scientists at their work. The project she is doing at Scapa Flow is due to last a few years and is a prime example of the kind of work she hopes to do more of in the future.