Rita McGurn

Died: April 7, 2015

Rita McGurn, who has died aged 74, was born in Market Street in Glasgow, beside Paddy's Market and close to the Barras. She was raised by her grandmother and eccentric grandfather, who owned an antique bric-a-brac shop and kept monkeys, love birds and ferrets in the family home. With this environment and her natural artistic ability and excellent eye for a piece of furniture or fabric, it was perhaps inevitable that she became an imaginative and individual designer for film, television, and theatre.

She left Whitehill secondary school in Dennistoun at the age of 14 and had a variety of office and restaurant jobs. Her art was self-taught. She went to Glasgow School of Art but as a model not a student. She was seldom without her own sketch pad and pencils.

She was also making sculptures from felt and wire. She started selling her work round the doors (in a feisty Barras fashion) but the sculptures were soon deemed of sufficient quality to be sold in Copland and Lye, a perjink department store in Sauchiehall Street.

It was in Africa that she made a breakthrough into the world of interior design. She was with her architect husband Peter McGurn on a six-year sojourn in Zambia when she went to work for Bracaire, a large mining company. Her job designing offices and houses for Bracaire executives took her to Ivory Coast and other parts of Africa. Other assignments included a Paris nightclub.

Back in Glasgow, she went into film design, working with director Charlie Gormley on films including Living Apart Together and Heavenly Pursuits. Restless Natives was next and many offers of work followed but were turned down as she decided that long hours and weeks away on location did not fit in with her commitment to bringing up her children.

She concentrated on short films and commercial work which fitted round family life. The eclectic nature of her work was reflected in an award for a Tennent's lager advertisement and a Bafta for a Tartan short film called Tumshie McFadgen's Bid for Ultimate Bliss. There was also an award for her window design of Strawberry Fields, a children's clothes shop in Glasgow.

Her talent as a set designer was an important element in the Play, Pie and a Pint series at Oran Mor in Glasgow which has become the most successful venture in contemporary Scottish theatre. The late David McLennan's inspired project was launched on a shoestring budget and her tireless search for interesting props and imagination in creating sets was invaluable.

All the time that she worked on film, TV, theatre and interior design she was also pursuing her art education. She taught herself oil painting. She studied the various methods of etching and engraving at the Glasgow Print Studio.

An art form which she made her own was what she called soft sculptures, life-size crocheted figures. To distinguish these artefacts from playthings, she had a website stating "These are not dolls".

These softly-sculpted people are legion. The most legendary is one who stands 14ft tall and is called Izal, after the toilet paper from which she was partly constructed. In another epic project, she crocheted 90 carpets. Add to these endeavours her paintings, drawings, mixed media, murals, family life and you might ask what she did in her spare time. Some of it she spent decorating the McGurn second home in Perpignan, France.

The rooftop flat has a moderately large hall into which she managed to fit 70 chandeliers made of plastic bottles, glasses, teaspoons, and any other household items that came to hand. Her husband Peter came home one day to find all crockery had been smashed to create a mosaic on the terrace.

She painted a series of murals in the Perpignan house which turned individual bedrooms into ancient Rome or a visit to the court of Louis XIV of France.

Rita could have been described as a hippie or a beatnik. Mostly she was a free spirit. She was blessed with film-star good looks and was the epitome of cool. Asked by a TV producer to meet him for a drink. Rita replied: "I can't imagine ever being that thirsty."

She quietly did much for charity. She regularly committed acts of individual kindness. All of this she insisted remained unacknowledged. Her soft spot for society's outcasts and misfits is illustrated by the tale of the Christmas burglary. She had been commissioned to do the Christmas tree for an edition of the Songs of Praise programme on television. For this she constructed a number of attractive but empty parcels and boxes. She then took the parcels home to decorate the McGurn family tree in advance of the real Christmas presents being put in the place.

There was a break-in and the intruders made off with empty boxes. Rita said: "What a shame for the poor burglar."

She was an earth mother and a great intuitive cook. Her food looked too good to eat but was far too good not to eat. Peter says her most successful work of art is her family.

She is survived by husband Peter, children Caron, Damien, Mercedes, Patrick, France-Lise Rose, and by nine grand-children.

TOM SHIELDS