NanoPhotonics group
Melissa Pierce Murray
NanoPhotonics group Artist in Residence: Melissa Pierce Murray
Unbounded
To celebrate our successful move to the Cavendish Laboratory Ray Dolby Centre, NanoPhotonics hosts Unbounded, a sculpture installation by Melissa Pierce Murray, with artworks responding to the lab’s ethos of restless curiosity and exploration.
Sited along corridors and stairways, the curved and tangled forms in steel and jesmonite invoke movement and dynamism. As inventor Ray Dolby insists, “you have to be willing to live with a sense of uncertainty, to work in this darkness and grope towards an answer, to put up with anxiety about whether there is an answer.”
Seemingly animate, these sculptures evoke the spirit of human inquisitiveness to explore the material world and push boundaries of thought. There is a sense of fields and interactions, of wave-particle embodiment, energetic wavepackets moving and exploring. They speak to non-linear thinking and the snarls and tangles of scientific research. We like living among them, and how they humanise our building joyfully.
Melissa Pierce Murray’s practice considers how engagement, interactions, objects, and materials can facilitate and deepen awareness of our place in the world. Murray has shown work across the UK and internationally including: ReInstate Tate Institute, Docklands 2024; Ovada, Oxford 2024; Artwalk Wakefield/Yorkshire Sculpture International, Wakefield, 2022; The Hostry, Norwich Cathedral, 2021. She was Artist in Residency at University College, Oxford, 2019-20 and a keynote speaker for Mestizajes International Conference on Art, Literature and Science, Spain, 2021. She is a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors. https://www.melissapmurray.com