Sharon Murphy

Mise en abyme

Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris 

07 Nov –
20 Dec 2024 

Commissioned and Curated by CCI Directrice, Nora Hickey M’Schilli.

Opening In-coversation artist interviewed nterview with Trish Lambe, Director, Photo Museum Ireland (7 Nov)

https://www.centreculturelirlandais.com/en/cci-online/conversation-entre-la-photographe-sharon-murphy-et-trish-lambe

 

https://www.centreculturelirlandais.com/en/whats-on/exhibitions-events/sharon-murphy-mise-en-abyme

Sharon Murphy’s new body of work focuses on Parisian carousels and theatrical décor during their moments of stillness and silence. It stems from what the artist describes as a ‘longstanding interest in staged spaces and the performative in photography’. Inhabited by inanimate painted horses, decorative frontispieces and drapery, these scenes become the point of departure for a wider exploration of fictive realism, the tension between hidden and revealed, negative and positive, illusion and disillusion. A mise en abyme of the practice of photography - itself a constructed fiction - and a delving into Freud’s notion of the uncanny, this exhibition at the Centre Culturel Irlandais evokes both enchantment and a pang of unease.

This special commission of photographic works is presented in association with Photo Museum Ireland.

The Ties that Bind

Shellter Artist Collective (S/TAC)

Diana Copperwhite, Allyson Keehan
Niamh McGuinne,Sharon Murphy, Geraldine O’Neill

GOMA, Waterford 

22 Oct –
24 Nov 2024 

Curated by Jenna Whelan, Director GOMA, Waterford.

Offician Opening by Artist Susan Connolly

The Ties that Bind is S/TAC’s fourth show to date and focuses on emotional, somatic and psychological aspects of shelter, presenting a short film The Ties that Bind, the collaborative installation The Clothesline, and a selection of works on paper to illustrate the genesis of the project which was initiated through a collaborative workshop held in the Chocolate Factory, Dublin 1.

The Ties that Bind is a short film created for Waterford’s Imagine Festival for GOMA and was filmed and edited by Fillipe Lezo with S/TAC. The clothesline can signify a variety of feminist and feminised ideas and is a deep-reaching metaphor for the ties that bind families, communities and women together. Strung together it becomes a symbol of the chaos and intersection of lives and cultures within an imposed vertical grid. The lines can be seen to embody twin notions of shelter/ exposure; concealment/revelation; reality/fiction; conscious/unconscious.

The Clothesline installation comprises a number of painted and printed textile pieces, each depicting a particular source of imagery, approach and palette associated with the members of the collective as individuals. While each carries the distinctive marks and gestures of each of the five artists of S/TAC, the whole work is unified through over-printing using colour and stencilled motifs which reference a connecting theme of exposure and masking of internal body organs. The collaborative installation acts as a symbol of shelter, connectedness and intersection which overtly plays with notions of ‘life on view’, private versus public, acts of display and exposure, domesticity and ‘women’s work’…

The works on paper were developed and facilitated by an Arts Council funded workshop, which focused on the embodiment of experience. Using mono-print and stencilling the first stage of the process which led to The Clothesline and has culminated in the film The Ties that Bind, saw an extended collaborative group including the collective, curators, scientists and individual artists create collage and layered prints on paper. These small prints were originally formed into giant capes and worn before being finally dismantled and sewn into books. In 2023, when the group was invited to exhibit in the National Gallery of Ireland, this work was further developed into The Clothesline using the concepts and processes initiated in the collaborative workshops.
Accompanying these collaborative works are a selection of pieces by each of the artists which provide some hints and suggestion to the particular significance/resonance to each and how that feeds into and is nourished by the participation and collaboration of a collective.

 

I am thrilled and grateful to receive this professional Development Award from Age and Opportunity as part of the Bealtaine Festival annual artist award. This grant will allow me to deepen my drawing practice and explore how drawing can be combined, mirrored and contrasted in my lens-based practice. Specifically this award allows me to formally train in drawing and I am very excited by this prospect. Sharon Murphy June 2024

In a dream in a happy house

Shellter Artist Collective (S/TAC)

Limerick City Gallery

20 June –
26 Augist 2024  

‘In a Dream in a Happy House’ is S/TAC’s third show to date and their first show that focuses solely on the collective itself rather than through the lens of a historical collection or role as artistic shelter. Once again, S/TAC zones in on the emotional and psychological theme of shelter but this time sets it in a more ominous expression; one of confinement, duty, expectation and the delusions of domestic bliss.  Taking inspiration in the title from the 1980s Siouxsie and the Banshees track ‘Happy House’, which is both an ironic take and a protest against an ideal of domesticity.

Shellter Artist Collective (S/TAC) is:
Diana Copperwhite, Allyson Keehan
Niamh McGuinne,Sharon Murphy, Geraldine O’Neill

194th RHA Annual Open Exhibition
 
 

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