Pinkie Maclure grew up in rural Scotland in the 1960s and 70s. A prodigious child artist, she gave up art after a troubled adolescence and only took it up again in her forties, when, after many years of unemployment, she fell by chance into a job making and mending domestic stained glass windows.
Depressed by the bland designs she was asked to produce at work, she became fascinated instead by the extraordinary imagery and allegorical power of medieval stained glass and in 2013, she decided to start making her own pieces.
She soon discovered that storytelling through stained glass could be a way out of years of artistic and emotional frustration.
Over the following years she taught herself many complex and innovative methods, learning to sandblast, paint, fire, engrave and layer hand blown glass. She makes highly-detailed work which is displayed in light boxes like glowing paintings. The meticulous slowness of the process allows her to access subconscious, dreamlike imagery and tell stories based on real-life, contemporary experiences and mysterious historical texts, characters and events.
Pinkie has been the recipient of a number of awards and her 2019 work ‘Self-Portrait Dreaming of Portavadie’ , which tells the story of her dearly-loved childhood haunt that was blown up and destroyed by an oil company in the 1970s, was recently acquired by the National Museum of Scotland for the National Collection.
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