11 July 2025
Lyon & Turnbull | Maria McStay
We are delighted to present our 2025 Graduate Showcase Award winner, Maria McStay. As part of the 2025 Graduate Showcase Award, Maria will spend a week working at the Bothy Project on the beautiful Scottish island of Eigg. A showcase of Maria's work will be exhibited in our Edinburgh saleroom in August 2026 alongside our Contemporary Art auction.
Maria McStay's practice is based in ceramics, sound, and site-specific materials to create installations that invite reflective engagement with the environment. By animating objects and playfully reimagining ancient utilitarian forms, her work bridges historical and contemporary practices. Drawing on personal experience, she navigates themes of memory, family, place, and materiality, often through the anthropomorphic vessel.
Rooted in embodied research methodologies, such as walking, foraging, and experimenting with local organic materials, her work is deeply tied to a sense of place. She prioritises slow, intentional craftsmanship, incorporating traditional techniques and sustainable methods. Maria's approach to making adopts an ecological sensitivity that resists the values of mass production and consumerism.
Here, Maria describes her 2025 Graduate Showcase piece 'Mionn na Deirfiúr'. 'Mionn na Deirfiúr' fictions a landscape of longing, where amplified vocals emanate from within large ceramic pots, encouraging viewers to pause and listen as sound evokes personal associations of place. The work reflects on my experience of living away from home for the first time, coinciding with my brother’s move to Australia, which has instilled a sense of change and separation into my practice.
Central to the installation is a soundscape that weaves together coastal field recordings with vocal recordings of my twin and I singing Siúil A Rúin, an Irish folk song translating to “go, my love”. Engaging with ancestral methods of making and marking, I adopt ancient hand-building techniques and pulverise rocks to create mineral pigments for colouring ceramics. The forms reference historical amphorae jars, but their functionality is disrupted by the placement of handles in unconventional positions, transforming them into ambiguous objects that blur the boundaries between past, present, and future.