art, contemporary fine art, photography, digital media
Wendy McMurdo (born 1962) specialises in photography and digital media. In 2018 she was named as one of the Hundred Heroines, an award created by the Royal Photographic Society to showcase global female photographic practice.[1]
Her work centres around the relationship between technology and identity and she has produced several influential bodies of work which explore this theme.
In the mid-1990s her first one-person show In a Shaded Place – the digital and the uncanny [2] was toured extensively by the British Council. Her subsequent exhibition at the Centro de Fotografia Universidad de Salamanca in 1998 resulted in the publication of the first monograph[3] on her work. She has been included in numerous group shows, including Unheimlich, curated by Urs Stahel at the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, Scanner, curated by Lawrence Rinder at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, California, The Anagrammatical Body – The Body and its Photographic Condition at the Neue Galerie Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum in Graz, Austria, and Only Make Believe – Ways of Playing, curated by Marina Warner at Compton Verney, UK.
Other commissions include Indeterminate Objects (classrooms) for The Media Wall, The Photographers' Gallery, London, October 2017 - January 2018; a site-specific project "The World in London" for The Photographers' Gallery exhibited during the 2012 Summer Olympics, and The Skater[6] for the Ffotogallery in Wales, 2009, to celebrate 30 years of photographic commissioning.
Recent exhibitions include: "Chat Room" (2019), curated by Hining Ye for the 2021 Shanghai Photofair;[7] newly commissioned work "Night Garden" as part of Florilegium curated by Emma Nicholson, the inaugural biennial exhibition marking the re-opening of Inverleith House at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh;[8][9][10] "On aime l’art...!!" from the Collection Lambert, in Avignon, France (2017);[11] "Gravitas", curated by Christiane Monarchi for Photo50[12] at the London Art Fair, 2017; DATA RUSH at the Old Sugar Factory in Groningen for the 22nd Noorderlicht International Photofestival; "Digital Play : Wendy McMurdo Collected Works 1995 - 2012" at Street Level Photoworks,[13]Glasgow, as part of GENERATION - 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland, a programme of exhibitions across Scotland in 2014. Her short film "Olympia" was showcased by Onedotzero as part of their Future Cities touring programme in 2011/2012. A retrospective of her photographic work was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Interdisciplinary Arts, University of Bath in 2011/2012.
Gilda Williams (Ed) (1997). Strange Days – British Contemporary Photography. Charta Press. Milan
David Brittain (Ed) (1999). Creative Camera: Thirty Years of Writing. Manchester University Press. Manchester[21]
Centro de Fotografia, Universidad de Salamanca (1998, 2000). Wendy McMurdo. Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca. Spain
Charlotte Cotton (2004). The Photograph as Contemporary Art (World of Art). Thames & Hudson. London
David Campany (Ed) (2007). Art and Photography (Themes & Movements). Phaidon Press Ltd. London
Daniel Rubinstein (2009). Digitally Yours; The Body in Contemporary Photography. The Issues in Contemporary Culture and Aesthetics, 2&3. pp. 181–195. ISBN0955003725. University of the Arts. London[22]
Ffotogallery (2009). Wendy McMurdo: The Skater. Ffotogallery. Wales.
Sylvia Wolf (2010). The Digital Eye: Photographic Art in the Electronic Age. Prestel. New York
Hilde Van Gelder & Helen Westgeest (2011). Photography Theory in Historical Perspective: Case Studies from Contemporary Art. Wiley-Blackwell. Chichester, UK
David Hopkins (2021). Dark Toys: Surrealism and the Culture of Childhood. Yale University Press. UK Europe and Overseas
Various (2021). Nachbilder. Eine Foto Text Anthologie. Herausgegeben von der Plattform Kulturpublizistik der Zurcher Hochschule der Kunste und dem Fotomuseum Winterthur Spector Books.
