Australian artist Suzanne McRae creates sculptures that seem to have reached us from another time. Animals with intense gazes and an almost human presence, constructed from antique materials that still bear the traces of the lives they once had.
A graduate in Ceramics from the University of Ballarat in Victoria, Australia, McRae spent many years working in costume and fashion, specialising in historical corsetry and costume. In time, she returned to her sculptural beginnings, bringing to ceramics all the experience she had acquired through textiles. It is from this union that the distinctive world of her work emerges.
Suzanne has a profound fascination with memory, the passage of time, and the beauty of things that have survived. She searches for her materials in flea markets, brocantes, attics, sheds and old private collections across Australia and Europe: brocades from nineteenth-century dresses, mother-of-pearl buttons, faded trimmings, stained and worn fabrics, antique fur, and fragments that once belonged to garments, furniture or cherished objects.
Rather than erasing the marks of time, she makes them an essential part of each piece. Stains, cracks, loose threads, wear and imperfections speak of a previous existence, giving her sculptures the strange sensation of encountering something that is at once newly created and profoundly old.
Her animals are, in the artist’s own words, “the anthropomorphic bridge between human and creature, the past and present, and truth or dream.” Foxes, cats, rabbits and other figures take on personalities of their own: solemn, melancholic, eccentric and subtly unsettling, they seem like characters rescued from a story we will never entirely know.
There is something in them of Victorian interiors suspended in time, of objects once cherished by previous generations that have, mysteriously, managed to outlive their owners.
Each Suzanne McRae sculpture is a unique piece, handcrafted from carefully sourced and reclaimed materials. Works in which sculpture, textiles, history and imagination come together to breathe new life into things that might otherwise have disappeared.
At Deco for Curious, we share this fascination with objects that carry a past, with the traces left by time, and with the imperfect beauty of things that have managed to survive. Perhaps that is why we felt an immediate connection with Suzanne McRae’s world and with these extraordinary creatures, which are now part of our collection.
