Holly Murray has a sculptor’s eye when it comes to costume design. Jacqui Bealing reports.

A CAR sponge has been twisted, cut and pinned to the head of a mannequin.

It may look like a cut-up car sponge at the moment, but by the time Holly Murray has completed her creation, it will resemble the hair of Marilyn Monroe.

It’s this creative eye that has helped Holly to carve out a career as a costume designer for some of the most innovative and outlandish performers currently on the circuit.

In her small studio in Ditchling Rise, Brighton, she has designed and made outfits and stage props for companies such as Oily Cart, who work with people with profound learning difficulties, to psychedelic rock band The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, to one-off commissions, such as a cloak for “the Wizard of Ditchling”.

The Marilyn hair will be a wig for a show being choreographed by Lea Anderson and inspired by the pop artist Andy Warhol’s prints of famous people. Other items under construction include a blue felt hat that will represent boxer Muhammed Ali’s hair, while a pair of pink boxer shorts, almost finished, shimmer from a hanger.

“I have a bit of a niche because I cross over into the slightly bizarre sculptural side,” says Holly, 46.

“A lot of people are classically trained makers or designers. They wouldn’t necessarily think to go to The Pound Shop and buy a bag of sponges to make a Marilyn Monroe wig. But I’m thinking the dancers have to get a wig on really quickly, and it’s got to be light, and it’s going to get crushed, and we don’t want it to look normal.”

One of her most inventive projects was her entry for the annual World of Wearable Art competition in New Zealand, where she was a finalist in last year’s show.

Inspired by the extraordinary architecture of Antoni Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona, Holly created a dress called Dragon’s Backbone using an array of materials, from velvet and glitter to polystyrene balls and high-density foam.

She says: “I had gone travelling to New Zealand and came across a museum in Nelson that had all these amazing costumes – clothes made to look like cars or strange beasts, or made from wood or metal. And I thought, these people speak my language.”

When she found out that the costumes were the winners of an international open competition held annually in Wellington and now regarded as one of the annual cultural highlights in New Zealand, she knew she had to enter it.

She then spent two months working on her dress, starting with a crinoline and then building up the structure using whatever she felt would work before packing it up and shipping it to New Zealand. “It then got stuck in customs and finally made it the day before the last date for entries,” she recalls.

The competition runs for three weeks and is attended by some 50,000 people. Although Holly’s entry didn’t win its category, she says it was a major achievement to make it to the final and admits the quality of the other entries was “breathtaking”.

“They are still clothes and the models have to be able to move around in them,” she points out. “But they are unlike anything you have ever seen. They are quite extraordinary.”

Holly’s interest in costume began in childhood. Her mother looked after the wardrobe for Southend on Sea’s amateur dramatic society and twice a year, when the next production was fast approaching, their dining room would be transformed into a workshop, with all the family being involved in cutting, sewing and gluing.

“One of my strongest memories is making stuff for My Fair Lady,” she says. “We were making fake parasols, so my dad was chopping up the dowel for the middle bit, and we were sticking ping-pong balls on the end and pleating fabric and putting bits of ribbon around the tops.

“I was then always around backstage at the shows, seeing it all come together. I found that exciting.”

Although she enjoyed making her own clothes as a teenager and was set to go into fashion design after taking an art foundation degree, she ended up studying sculpture at the University of Newcastle because of her interest in 3D design.

Her move back into costume came about after playing congas for dance classes to earn a little money while still a student. This led to her working with the Dance City venue in Newcastle to make their costumes. When she relocated to Brighton a few years later, she soon found work creating costumes for local and London dance and theatre companies.

Among her regular clients are Brighton-based performers Liz Aggiss and Billie Cowie, for whom she made and designed oufits for their Channel Four short film Motion Control.

Earlier this year her handiwork was paraded by Brighton’s Bicycle Ballet for their show Blazing Saddles. She has also run workshops at festivals, such as Glastonbury and Womad (one resulted in a sculpture garden of fabric-festooned models to highlight the continuing plight of the victims of the Bhopal nuclear disaster in India).

Her other customers include professional choreographers who teach a Masters course in dance at the University of Chichester. Getting the right look for the costumes often involves Holly encouraging the choreographers to be visually bold and adventurous- and to find inspiration in the less obvious places.

“They might say they have seen something on YouTube and I say that’s great, but go to the library and find a fusty, quirky old book that no one has looked at for 40 years. You’ll find stuff in other places that other people aren’t finding because it’s not on the internet and it’s not so readily available. Finding those nuggets of fabulousness is so exciting.”

Despite the fact that Holly is never short of commissions, the theatre industry has such tiny budgets for her services that she has to supplement this income with more conventional work in the fashion industry.

She freelances at fashion houses such as Burberry, sometimes helping to put shows together or doing some sample machining. She also makes leather bags and accessories, which she sells to shops and takes on commissions.

“If you work in the creative industries you have to be creative about how you generate your income,” she points out. “I enjoy working at fashion houses, but I am a cog in the machine. I’m not being creative. My favourite jobs are when I turn up here at the studio and I have to do something like make a 16th century golden galleon and I think, now, how am I going to do that?”

• For more information about Holly, see hollymcostume.co.uk. Holly, together with fellow artists, designers and art directors at Beaconsfield Workshops in Ditchling Rise, will be selling their goods during weekends throughout November and December, at Sand Flooring Company in Preston Road, Brighton.