2025 OUTSIDER ART FAIR PREVIEW: THE SCOTTISH ARTIST PINKIE MACLURE CRAFTS STRANGE IMAGES IN LUMINOUS STAINED GLASS

A MUSICIAN FINDS CREATIVE FREEDOM WORKING IN A MEDIUM THAT ISN’T USUALLY ASSOCIATED WITH OUTSIDER ARTISTS

by Edward M. Gómez

NEW YORK, February 22, 2025 — For purists, stone, bronze, and oil on canvas represent the majestic, enduring stuff of “serious” art.

Meanwhile, in the overlapping, related fields of art brut and outsider art, the kinds of art-making materials viewers normally encounter include such ordinary provisions as pencils; colored pencils; plain, cheap house paint; and found scraps of paper or cardboard, among other inexpensive items that many self-taught art-makers, who often do not have the financial resources to afford high-priced tools and supplies, tend to use.

Pinkie Maclure, “Landfill Tantrum,” 2013, stained glass in light box, 18 x 19 inches (45 x 50 centimeters). Photo courtesy of the artist

Both in the broad, multifaceted category of contemporary art as well as in the outsider-art field, fashioning stained glass is not an art-making technique many artists commonly employ. Stained glass is, however, the art-making method and, to some degree, even the subject itself of the work of Pinkie Maclure. At the 2025 Outsider Art Fair in New York (Thursday, February 24 through Sunday, March 2), the dealer Marion Harris will be presenting this artist’s unusual, luminous confections.

Maclure, who grew up in the Scottish Highlands, halfway between Inverness and Aberdeen, recently told brutjournal, “[As a maker of stained-glass art,] I am self-taught, having learned the basics from a book. When I was in my late thirties, living in London, I started helping a friend who made replicas of Victorian windows for a living. We worked from a squatted school, and I hated most of the work, as it was dull and repetitive, but it fit quite well with my lifestyle as a semi-professional, touring musician, so I continued [with it].”

Pinkie Maclure, “Tree of Life and Death Circumstances,” 2022, stained glass in light box, 27 x 27 inches (68 x 68 centimeters). Photo by Rebecca Milling, courtesy of Pinkie Maclure

As a musician, Maclure performed as a solo artist from the 1980s until, in 1995, she met John Wills, another musician who had served as the drummer in and record producer for two successful bands, Loop and The Hair & Skin Trading Company. After meeting Wills, Maclure’s new collaborator went on to produce her solo album “Favourite,” which released by Beggars Banquet Records. It featured music in an experimental, electronic-pop style.

Together, Maclure and Wills perform as a band known as Pumajaw. About their sound, Maclure observed, “The musical ideas we share combine field recordings, electronic folk, and songwriting. We’ve released eight albums and we record, perform, and write our own material, although we’ve also recorded versions of songs by David Lynch and Jacques Brel, and modern versions of traditional folk songs.” Maclure describes herself as “primarily a singer,” but she also plays a small squeezebox and keyboards. She told brutjournal, “Nowadays, I also sing and perform live at my solo exhibitions, with a 3D sound installation created by John and myself.”

Retracing her art-making career’s trajectory, Maclure told us, “After about 15 years, I felt very depressed and frustrated both with [our] boring stained-glass clients’ horrible design ideas and with the boring music industry (which said that I was too scary).”

Pinkie Maclure, “Beauty Tricks,” 2022, stained glass in light box, 48 x 24 inches (123 x 63 centimeters); now in the collection of the Stained Glass Museum, Ely, Cambridgeshire, England. Photo by Rebecca Milling, courtesy of Pinkie Maclure

Her own creations are not your great-grandparents’ illustrational kind of institutional-religious stained glass.

Instead, Maclure’s colorful, vibrant compositions evoke the elegance and solemnity of the gloriously decorative windows of old Christian churches and cathedrals even as they address such secular, contemporary subjects as insomnia, drug addiction, and humanity’s destructive relationship with nature. Often made with repurposed greenhouse glass, their compositions include sections featuring hand-painted images.

Today, they can be found in such public collections as those of the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh (which owns the artist’s “Self-portrait Dreaming of Portavadie,” 2019) and the Stained Glass Museum in Ely, Cambridgeshire, north of London (which last year acquired Maclure’s “Beauty Tricks,” 2017).

Pinkie Maclure, “The Soil,” 2023, stained glass in six light boxes, 120 x 99 inches (304 x 251 centimeters). Photo courtesy of the artist

About her experiences in the music industry and as a visual artist, Maclure noted, “We’ve never made any money from it. I started making my own highly personal stained-glass light boxes in 2012, when I needed another creative outlet. The music business is a form of torture; it tries to stamp out unconventional women. However, through stained-glass art, I’ve found my rebellious voice once again. I can do what I want, because by making light boxes, I don’t have to work on commission.”

About the expressive, creative freedom she enjoys as a maker of stained-glass art, Maclure added, “I can experiment with new techniques and make the work spontaneously, and I can be myself — at last.”