Marianna Magurudumian‑O'Reilly Installations

INSTALLATIONS + SCULPTURE + TEXTILE

Here you will find a curated selection of 3D works by Marianna Magurudumian-O'Reilly.

Grotesque Mirror 2024, upcycled mirror, hair, wood, wool, removable papier-mache mask, plastic nails, recycled fabric, 70x80cm

STUDIO GROTESQUE

"In her first solo exhibition since relocating from London to Catalonia, Marianna Magurudumian-O’Reilly transforms the subterranean gallery of Museu de l'Ebre, Tortosa - tucked beneath the Millennium Bridge and flanked by the slow, tidal presence of the Ebro River - into a site of excavation, ritual, and metamorphosis.

Drawing on the Renaissance grotesque - those hybrid forms rediscovered in the buried halls of Nero’s Domus Aurea - Magurudumian-O’Reilly cultivates her own ecosystem of textile busts, woven assemblages, videos, paintings, and drawings. These works blur the seams between human, animal, plant, and architecture, evoking cave formations, mineral growths, and mythic bodies caught mid-transformation. In the hanging series of sculptures Neo-Morph / Cave Women, calcified stalactites and stalagmites double as metaphors for the slow sedimentation of memory and experience, where the flow of life is likened to water running through stone - or through one’s fingers.

Her process is anchored in surrealist intuition: random mark-making as an act of unearthing, organic dyes as stains of time, discarded objects and fabrics as archaeological fragments of the everyday. Each surface is a terrain where subconscious “shadows” take form - recalling Plato’s allegory of the cave, yet refusing a single, fixed truth. Instead, the viewer is invited to chart their own excavation, following a trail of psychic residues and cultural sediments." M. Magurudumian-O'Reilly, 2024

The Watcher 2024 recycled fabric, felt, wood, handmade papier-mache mask, acrylic paint, 70x100cm

Neo Morph 2024, recycled fabric, felt, embroidery, natural dye, 200 x 200cm

Neo Morph 2024, recycled fabric, felt, embroidery, natural dye, ceramic beads, 200 x 200cm

Neo Morph 2024, recycled fabric, felt, embroidery, natural dye, 200 x 200cm

NEO-MORPH
A series of hanging fabric sculptures conceived for Studio Grotesque exhibition(2024), Marianna renders the body as a mineral archive - flesh imagined as a calcified landscape, suspended between growth and erosion. Shaped like stalactites and stalagmites, each form bears the slow inscriptions of time, its contours carved by personal history, memory, and the quiet gravity of aging.

Here, water is both sculptor and witness: a patient force that deposits and dissolves, building shape through countless small gestures. Magurudumian-O’Reilly draws on this metaphor to reframe cultural narratives around aging - not as decline, but as a process of accumulation, where every crease, texture, and curve becomes a testament to lived experience.

The sculptures hang like fragments from a subterranean cathedral, their presence oscillating between geological formation and corporeal relic. In their softened mineralism, they invite touch, reflection, and a reconsideration of the body’s transformations - not as something to conceal, but as a site of beauty, resilience, and ongoing becoming.

Echidna 2024 Recycled fabric, felt, 90x60cm, acrylic painting on recycled door 75x170cm

Echidna (detail) 2024 Recycled fabric, felt, 90x60cm

Three-Faced 2024 Papier-mache, palette wood, 30x35cm

Vision Serpent 2023 recycled fabric, felt, embroidery, natural dye, acrylic paint, net, stone beads, 160 x 160cm

Gestation 2023, acrylic on recycled wooden beam, wool 30x40x30cm

Impossible Rose 2023, recycled palette wood, papier-mache, acrylic paint, 30x30cm

Impossible Rose 2023, recycled palette wood, papier-mache, acrylic paint, 30x30cm

Mother Totem 2022, recycled fabric, embroidery, bamboo, wool, leather, natural stone beads, 50x70cm

Green Warrior 2022, recycled fabric, embroidery, bamboo, wool, 50x65cm

Undewater Venus 2022, recycled textile, embroidery, stone and ceramic beads, wool, 40x60cm

Secret Geometry 2022, recycled fabric, wool, bead, bamboo, 23x38cm

Grotesque Fountain 2023, recycled fabric, natural walnut dye, 95x135cm

The Triumph of Laughter 2022, recycled fabric, embroidery, wool, 60x90cm

THE TRIUMPH OF LAUGHTER Installation stages the body as both a site of violence and a weapon of resistance. Informed by the artist’s own survival of sexual abuse at age fourteen, the work confronts the architecture of trauma - not in silence, but in an act of defiant, uncontainable laughter.

A stylised, cut-out human figure carries a padded box: a room lined with dark patterned wallpaper, at once a fragment of familial architecture and a claustrophobic cell. Inside, a tufted female form - soft, scarred, and threaded with red - evokes the Venus of Willendorf, an ancient talisman of fertility and genealogical resilience. This figure becomes a vessel for a lineage of women, mothers, and survivors whose love and strength nourish future generations." 2022

From the cut-out figure emerges an enlarged, disembodied mouth, embroidered with a vortex of text: "When I was 14 years old, I narrowly escaped being raped by a close family member. I fought hard but it was laughter that saved me. This rapist wasn’t a match for my hard laughter."

The spiral typography mimics the hypnotic replay of traumatic memory, yet here it is re-coded as a loudspeaker-amplifying a voice long suppressed. Laughter, in this work, is neither dismissal nor nervous reflex; it is a psychological weapon, an intuitive act of self-defence, a sonic rupture in the cycle of abuse.

Through this public telling, Magurudumian-O’Reilly transforms private harm into a shared space for healing. The piece functions simultaneously as personal testimony, feminist protest, and an invitation to collective conversation. In its collision of tenderness and ferocity, The Triumph of Laughter reframes survival not as quiet endurance, but as an active, embodied reclamation - one that insists the voice, once freed, can reverberate far beyond the moment of severance.

The Triumph of Laughter (Detail) 2022, recycled fabric, embroidery, wool, 60x90cm