Withholding, Stillness, and the Fictive Real
Lecture on Current PracticeThis lecture offers an overview of Murphy’s current practice in photography, installation, and moving image, shaped by a formative background in theatre and scenographic thinking. It traces how space, staging, and attention operate as structuring principles across her work, while offering insight into artistic process, how work develops through time, return, and sustained looking.
Centred on Mise en Abyme (2021–2024), developed largely in Paris during a residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, the lecture explores photography as an unstable medium, one that holds a trace of the real while remaining constructed, interpretive, and psychologically charged. Murphy introduces the concept of the fictive real to describe images that are materially grounded yet atmospherically improbable, operating between fact and imagination.
Recurring motifs such as curtains, slits, coverings, and closed or dormant structures are discussed as strategies of withholding rather than revelation. These threshold spaces, including carousels, curtains, veils, stages and temporary theatres, function as propositional sites, inviting a state of doubled seeing in which meaning is suspended rather than resolved. Stillness is examined both as an aesthetic condition and as a working method, emerging through duration, return, and attentive looking.
Delivered for MA, BA, and doctoral students, as well as visiting artists, the lecture reflects on how Mise en Abyme clarified through being exhibited in different institutional contexts, at the Centre Culturel Irlandais (Paris), Photo Museum Ireland (Dublin), and Golden Thread Gallery (Belfast), each revealing distinct dimensions of the work. Rather than arriving as a fixed series, the project developed through repetition, installation, and dialogue with commissioner, curators, fine art printers, and collaborators.
Overall, the lecture proposes a practice that thinks slowly and spatially, valuing time, withholding, and relational encounter. It positions exhibition-making as integral to photographic practice, and the image not as a vehicle for explanation, but as a condition in which meaning can arise.
