Sharon Murphy

194th RHA Annual Open Exhibition

20 May – 4 August 2024
 
 

Interval III (136 x 109 cms)
Fine Art Pearl Archival Print mounted on dibond, tray framed. 

    

The ladder
is always there

8 Dec 2023 –
3 Feb 2024
at Draíocht 

Curated by S/TAC
 
Photo Credit: Declan Murphy Lighthouse

Shell/Ter Artist Collective (S/TAC): Diana Copperwhite, Allyson Keehan, Niamh McGuinne, Sharon Murphy, Geraldine O’Neill in association with ten emerging artists; Maya Brezing, Matthew Coll, Karen Ebbs, Spencer Glover, Ami Jackson, Mary Martin, Fiach McGuinne, Sorcha McNamara, Eileen Leonard Sealy and Catherine Ward.

The exhibition’s title, the ladder is always there, is from the poem ‘Diving into the Wreck’ by the feminist American poet Adrienne Rich who conjures the image of a woman preparing for a deep-sea scuba dive to explore a shipwreck. The ladder can be understood as both an object and as a metaphor for support and movement, always there.

The main focus of this exhibition is to highlight the role of an artist collective as a form of support for early career artists and to encourage collective action through art. It presents new works by recent graduates alongside more established artists in drawing, painting and its expanded forms — photography, print, film, installation — which take inspiration from or which reference painting, both materially and conceptually.

Opening by Christine Kennedy, Senior Curator/Head of Collections at IMMA.

︎Draiocht website

    

Shell/Ter Artists Collective S/TAC at National Gallery of Ireland | Film 2023

Special thanks:
Lore Films 

    

Shelter Prints and Drawings Gallery, National Gallery of Ireland.
8 July–12 November 2023
 

16 works from the National Collection
16 works from Shell/Ter Artist Collective S/TAC (Diana Copperwhite, Allyson Keehan, Niamh McGuinne, Sharon Murphy, Geraldine O’Neill)
5 works from invited artists:Tom Hunter (UK), Gulsun Karamustafa (Turkey) Sharon Kelly (NI), Daniel Pitín (Czech Rep), Lilane Tomosko (Hungary/Switzerland)

Installation  photography by Declan Murphy
1. Detail from The Clothesline by S/TAC
2. White carousel with Drawing, 2022
3. Detail The 12th House, curtain/carousel installation, 2023
4. Interval, 2015  

Centre Culturel Irlandais, Open Studio
Paris Sept–Oct 2023

‘Sharon Murphy is a lens-based artist whose work investigates the boundaries between the seen/unseen, fictive / real, conscious / (sub)liminal. Drawing on a background in theatre and informed by concepts in magic realism and psychoanalysis, recurring motifs in her work include: theatre curtains; carousels; performative sites; embodied / disembodied staged spaces.  

During her residency she will develop a series of photographs based on Parisian Carousels and other sites of performance, using as a starting point Freud’s notion of the uncanny: that class of terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.’

Open Studios at CCI 15th Sept 2023