A small Hoxton, London studio led by artist-designer Morag Myerscough, known for large colourful installations, murals and buildings in public places such as hospitals and schools.
Studio Myerscough is a London studio that makes bold, large-scale artwork for public places. Its founder, Morag Myerscough, is known for using colour, pattern and words on walls, buildings and temporary structures. Examples named in interviews include the Temple of Agape on London's Southbank in 2014, the Belonging Bandstand, work at Sheffield Children's Hospital, the Deptford Project Cafe, an installation at the Design Museum, and a five-year project at Battersea Power Station. She treats temporary and permanent commissions in the same way and tries not to repeat projects, though she reuses symbols and motifs.
Morag Myerscough was born and raised in north London. She trained at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art, graduating in 1988, and taught at Central Saint Martins for seven years. Creative Boom reports that she founded the studio in 1993 with her first outdoor piece, a hoarding for Britishland in the City of London. Her guiding saying is a Chinese proverb: "Make happy those that are near and those that are far will come." She says she wants people to feel they belong to the work and to see their surroundings differently. The studio says its work is meant for places such as hospitals, schools and outdoor spaces.
The studio is in Hoxton, east London, according to an Elephant studio visit, and Myerscough herself has always lived in London. Her projects include UK commissions and some abroad, such as a Zynga office in San Francisco and a Las Vegas festival, all run from London. Creative Bloq's 2017 list of UK top studios also appears in search results for it. The studio has worked with community groups to reflect local identity and history, as with the Belonging Bandstand, where local people were asked what belonging meant to them.
The studio is deliberately small. Creative Boom says it grew to a team of eight at its peak and then scaled back because Myerscough found a larger set-up unfulfilling. Today she works with a smaller regular group and with paid painters, whom she once recruited through an Instagram call. She works hands on, artworking every pattern and word herself, and builds large pieces on site from plywood, painted by hand with weather-resistant household paints. Luke Morgan, who has worked with her since 2002, collaborates on structures and interactive elements. This comes from a 2019 interview and a studio visit, so details may have changed.
The jobs in a studio like this are craft-based: designers and artists, painters and makers, project managers and engineers, contractors and installers, and people who talk to schools, hospitals and communities about what they want. If you enjoy painting, pattern and working at full scale outdoors, it shows that design can mean big physical projects as well as screens. Because the team is small and changes with each project, check the studio's website or social channels for how it works today.
Website: www.studiomyerscough.com
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