Gwynn Murrill

Gwynn Murrill’s sculptures balance a reverence for the natural world with a refined approach to materials. Working in bronze, marble, and wood, Murrill typically selects predatory animals such as coyotes, big cats, and birds of prey for her sculptures. She retains the core form of each animal, maintaining its recognizable features while reducing it to a sleek, reductive, and finished form. Murrill’s appreciation for and sensitivity toward material manifests in her sculptures, as she polishes each down to a finish. Distinct from her sculptures of fauna, Murrill has also created more rough-hewn human figures coated with splotchy patinas.

"My primary point of departure when beginning a new piece is the memory of a form that caught my attention; it could be a cat walking through the studio, a coyote jumping from the brush, a ballet dancer casually stretching, or the inferred three-dimensional form of the bodies in a Japanese woodblock print.

To recreate this imagined form, I begin the sculptural process by reducing blocks of wood or foam to a more recognizable shape. The manifestation of the idea takes on a life of its own which I see through until the end, even if it ends up in a slightly different form from the original imagined one.

I am most well known for my animal forms. As I am surrounded in my daily life by the fauna that inhabit the California countryside, it came naturally that I began to use their lines and shapes as the inspiration for my exploration of form.

My interest lies in using my chosen subject as a means to create a form that is simultaneously abstract and figurative. I enjoy the challenge of trying and take the form that nature makes so well and to derive my own interpretation of it." - Gwynn Murrill

SOURCE - https://www.artsy.net/artist/gwynn-murrill (Oct 2025) & https://www.murrillsculpture.com/about-2 (Oct 2025)