At the core of Murphy’s practice is her ongoing engagement with photography’s inherent and simultaneous tensions between the real/indexical and the unreal/constructed.”
— Stephanie McBride, Irish Arts Review
Made between 2021 and 2024, Mise en Abyme is an evolving series grounded in an embodied practice of return: walking the city, revisiting Parisian carousels, tents, curtains, and stages in states of stillness. Murphy photographs these scenes alone and mostly on foot, seeking images that suggest a slippage between real and fictive space.
The work draws on her background in theatre and a fascination with what lies behind the curtain and its threshold of folds, and the seams.
Titles such as Another Heavenly Day (after Beckett) and the Intervals images (after Lucio Fontano) signal an ongoing dialogue with performance, abstraction, rupture, and repair.
Recurrent motifs, drapery, cuts, slashes, mirrored forms, are framed with precision, yet hold within them a sense of estrangement and doubleness.
Influenced by psychoanalysis, and the uncanny which invites a subtle disorientation. It is as much about the grammar of photography -light and shadow, the crop, the exposure - as it is about the psychic atmosphere of the spaces depicted.
Ultimately, it is the viewer’s gaze that completes the image stitching together the seen and the sensed, the absent and the implied.
— Stephanie McBride, Irish Arts Review
Made between 2021 and 2024, Mise en Abyme is an evolving series grounded in an embodied practice of return: walking the city, revisiting Parisian carousels, tents, curtains, and stages in states of stillness. Murphy photographs these scenes alone and mostly on foot, seeking images that suggest a slippage between real and fictive space.
The work draws on her background in theatre and a fascination with what lies behind the curtain and its threshold of folds, and the seams.
Titles such as Another Heavenly Day (after Beckett) and the Intervals images (after Lucio Fontano) signal an ongoing dialogue with performance, abstraction, rupture, and repair.
Recurrent motifs, drapery, cuts, slashes, mirrored forms, are framed with precision, yet hold within them a sense of estrangement and doubleness.
Influenced by psychoanalysis, and the uncanny which invites a subtle disorientation. It is as much about the grammar of photography -light and shadow, the crop, the exposure - as it is about the psychic atmosphere of the spaces depicted.
Ultimately, it is the viewer’s gaze that completes the image stitching together the seen and the sensed, the absent and the implied.