Mise en abyme
29 April – 29 June 2025
Launch 18.00 Thursday 8 May 2025
Photo Museum Ireland is delighted to present the Irish premiere of Sharon Murphy’s new body of work Mise en Abyme, which focuses on Parisian carousels and theatrical décor during moments of stillness and silence. Drawing on her background in theatre and informed by concepts from psychoanalysis and magic realism in literature, this new work highlights Murphy’s longstanding interest in staged spaces and the performative in photography.
In Western art history, ‘mise en abyme’ is the technique of placing a copy of an copy within itself.Murphy uses this concept as a metaphor to investigate the boundaries between real and fictive spaces, concentrating on recurring motifs of theatre curtains, outdoor carousels, circus tents, performative sites, city parks and empty stages.
These scenes become the point of departure for a wider exploration of the tension between hidden and revealed, negative and positive, illusion and disillusion. This work addresses the essential nature of photographic seeing, performance, and Freud’s notion of the uncanny where the familiar becomes suddenly strange and disconcerting through a play between presence and absence, evoking both enchantment and a pang of unease.
This series marks a significant evolution in Murphy’s practice both conceptually and in terms of using the materiality of the photographic images, with an emphasis on the sculptural presence of the work, blurring the boundaries between real and represented space. The worlds implied or symbolised are both actual and potential, characterised by a capacity to juxtapose several spaces and instances of time and experience within one tangible space and where tropes of the mise en abyme – doubleness, reflexivity, repetition, mirroring – play out.
This exhibition is presented in partnership with the Centre Culturel Irlandais who commissioned and premiered the work in 2024, and Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast.
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29 April – 29 June 2025
Launch 18.00 Thursday 8 May 2025
Photo Museum Ireland is delighted to present the Irish premiere of Sharon Murphy’s new body of work Mise en Abyme, which focuses on Parisian carousels and theatrical décor during moments of stillness and silence. Drawing on her background in theatre and informed by concepts from psychoanalysis and magic realism in literature, this new work highlights Murphy’s longstanding interest in staged spaces and the performative in photography.
In Western art history, ‘mise en abyme’ is the technique of placing a copy of an copy within itself.Murphy uses this concept as a metaphor to investigate the boundaries between real and fictive spaces, concentrating on recurring motifs of theatre curtains, outdoor carousels, circus tents, performative sites, city parks and empty stages.
These scenes become the point of departure for a wider exploration of the tension between hidden and revealed, negative and positive, illusion and disillusion. This work addresses the essential nature of photographic seeing, performance, and Freud’s notion of the uncanny where the familiar becomes suddenly strange and disconcerting through a play between presence and absence, evoking both enchantment and a pang of unease.
This series marks a significant evolution in Murphy’s practice both conceptually and in terms of using the materiality of the photographic images, with an emphasis on the sculptural presence of the work, blurring the boundaries between real and represented space. The worlds implied or symbolised are both actual and potential, characterised by a capacity to juxtapose several spaces and instances of time and experience within one tangible space and where tropes of the mise en abyme – doubleness, reflexivity, repetition, mirroring – play out.
This exhibition is presented in partnership with the Centre Culturel Irlandais who commissioned and premiered the work in 2024, and Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast.
Buy the Exhibition Catalogue
Sharon Murphy — Mémoire Fictive / Faux Souvenir
Cristin reading — 25 April 2025