Sharon Murphy

I am delighted to be awarded a grant from Carlow County Council to support the development of new work in 2025 and am most grateful to the selectors and the Arts Office staff.

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 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.

 

Professional Development Award Age and Opportunity

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

‘Desiring Drapery’ is this year’s commissioned essay by Dr Alyson Keehan, for the RHA annual Exhibition catalogue. Her insightful critical work features art from a wide range of artists, including me, who employ textiles, costumes, materials, drapes in their work. 

Artists include: Aideen Barry, Susan Connolly, Amanda Coogan, Naomi Draper, Allyson Keehan, Mick O’Dea, Geraldine O Neill, Rajinder Singh, Jennifer Trouton. My work from the series ︎Intervals is featured.

You can read the essay ︎here.

Image: Untitled I from ‘Intervals’ (2014/2015).