Ro Murray acknowledges the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the traditional custodians of the land on which she lives and work. She supports the Uluru Statement of the Heart.
ARCHITECTURE AND BEYOND a group show at Willoughby Council Incinerator Art Space 29 May- 12 June, with fellow artists Mandy Burgess, Michelle Le Dain, Sarah Fitzgerald, Lisa Pang, Nicola McClelland, playfully exploring the legacy of Marion Mahony Griffin and Walter Burley Griffin.
Forest, 2021, Lino Print
Reflected in the Glass and Chevron Doors, 2021, Lino Print
Exhibition room sheet and Essay by Lisa Pang - read here.
Sadly many exhibitions were postponed last year due to Covid but it’s great to be able to exhibit again. I was pleased to have 3 works included in the North Sydney Art Prize on show at the historic Coal Loader Site at Ball’s Head.
The Earth is Changing (within my Lifetime), 2022, an installation of lino prints on pianola rolls.
Through the Tunnel 2022, plywood, steel, acrylic paint
And an installation by Murray and Burgess Once Was 2022, fallen timber, fabric, steel, acrylic paint
In the Company of Trees 2022, fallen timber, fabric, steel, acrylic paint.
An installation by Murray and Burgess at Inside Outside Sculpture Plinth at Ted Mack Civic Park North Sydney.
Also changes for Mandy Burgess and I. We are excited with the formalisation of our creative partnership based at Mt Victoria, with our new website and our new email address (murrayandburgess@murrayandburgess.com.au). Since meeting up again at NAS 2015, we have collaborated on many projects and group exhibitions, and been selected for many art prizes and staged three solo exhibitions.
Recently we were selected finalists for Sculpture at Sawmillers McMahons Point now rescheduled 18-27 February 2022 with our work MISE-EN-ABYME (YELLOW), which repeats our previous work in BLUE TOO shown at Kandos with MAPBM in FEB-April 2021. This work is a mini forest of dead trees echoing the more and more occurrence of natural disasters due to climate change.
Contour556, Canberra Biennial in October 2022. Our work FALLEN FOREST highlights the plight of endangered woodland birds, particularly the Regent honeyeater, whose near extinction is being caused by the catastrophic reduction of its habitat by drought, land clearing and flooding.
Concept drawing Fallen Forest
We are also thrilled to be selected for The Blue Mountains Cultural Centre Expose Program, which gives exhibition opportunities to emerging and mid-career local artists. We will exhibit CALL AND RESPONSE: A SEARCH FOR BIRDSONG IN THE FALLEN FOREST 1 December 2022-29 January 2023.
This exhibition is a development of the Contour556 work exploring new professional terrain: forming links with conservation groups and applying for a grant to collaborate with a local composer and musicians. Our intention with this eco-arts project is direct attention for collaborator organisations: Blue Mountains World Heritage Institute, Birdlife Australia, Taronga Zoo, and their programs supporting the survival of the critically endangered regent honeyeater.
Murray and Burgess, Call and Response (excerpt) score drawing
These times of COVID and isolation have meant adaption. Plans are made, remade, cancelled, meetings and seeing online. My group exhibition Architecture and Beyond, about the architectural couple Marion Mahoney and Walter Burley Griffin, was intended to coincide with Marion’s 150 birthday at the Griffin designed Incinerator Willoughby, is now rescheduled from August to 2022
LEAF
AFTER LEAF
Last year I had the renewed joy and pleasure walking through forests under a canopy of trees, along foot tracks around and over rocks. This is called shinrin-yoku in Japanese, forest bathing, a physiological and psychological exercise for wellbeing. Unlike monoculture forests in other countries, Australian forests have a diversity with multispecies of trees, depending on the soil and aspect. The trees are identified often by the leaves on the path.
I was walking the Great North Walk, from Sydney towards Newcastle, and was aware that others had walked these paths before for generations. My prints are inspired by the Forest Portrait drawings of Marion Mahony Griffin from 1919; and by a silk screen poster of Marie McMahon, You are On Aboriginal Land 1984.
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a parenthesis of eight, now seven, spaces
HOLD EVERYTHING DEAR, NOW MORE THAN EVER
Ro Murray, Michelle Belgiorno, Mandy Burgess, Deborah Burdett, Renuka Fernando, Jo Meisner, Michelle Connolly, Tilly Lees
Two years ago, back when the world was different, eight artists grouped together to exhibit under a call to hold everything dear. A call that could be anything from an urgent cry out loud - strident and politic - to quieter, mutterings to self. Only it had to be a call for human qualities of survival and resistance against inequity and despair. Since that time however, the eight have sadly and unexpectedly lost one of their group, and now come together once more without her, to exhibit artworks made against that intervening, overwhelming, desperate event of a global pandemic. After grief and isolation, the call is all the more poignant, to hold everything dear, as they say, now more than ever. [Read more of Lisa Pang’s essay]
A site responsive wall construction in 100 and 150 mm PVC strips and nails, 240cm high x 750cm long, and 15 unique lino prints on 300gsm Somerset Satin White paper. Read More…
100 & 150mm PVC nailed to the wall.
Site specific wall-work installed at Articulate Project Space, Leichhardt.
Room size 3 x 7m.
Images Carlos Velasquez
Murray and Burgess are installing their work UN-FOREST, mini dead forest of eleven trees, surrounded by siren yellow skirts. Contour 556 from 10 to 31 October. Installed Northbourne Ave (near Capitol Hill), Canberra.
Originally titled, FORTRESS 2019 seven trees, no longer protected by man-made climate change, as evidence of this year’s droughts, floods and bushfires.
Group Exhibition at Chrissie Cotter Gallery, sponsored by InnerWest Council.
(L to R) Ro Murray, Sarah Fitzgerald, Michelle le Dain, Mandy Burgess, Nicola McClelland (in lock down in Melbourne)
The exhibition is about points of intersection, divergence and changing circumstances. Through sculpture, printmaking, photography and installation the artists reflect the impact of change, individually and as global citizens. This exhibition was conceived prior to the COVID19 pandemic and anticipates the current situation the world is in. Change and uncertainty are all around us and the road we thought was clearly laid out has disappeared. This is an exceptional time for artists to exhibit and exchange ideas through artistic practice.
McClelland “Call and Response” poster, Murray “Heartbeats” lino prints
A solo exhibition of Ro Murray's latest wall weaving works at AIRspace Projects, Marrickville. Opening 6-8pm, Friday 3 July 10 Junction St, Marrickville 11am-5pm, Thursday - Sunday.
Every Time the Sun Comes Up is the wistful song playing in the background while artist Ro Murray works alone and to a new rhythm in her studio. For many, this recent lockdown has been a time defined by isolation and yearning. The chorus every time the sun comes up, I’m in trouble references repetition, physical cycles and what it is to feel blue, yet is tinted with warmth and the suggestion of renewal. The linoleum-printed series made during this period, Riff in Prussian Blue, sees a marked shift in colour. Murray’s past signature palette of red and black on white has relaxed and given way to yellows and blues, woven through with violets and greens. Visually it seems as if the new hues have been laid over and across the old familiar order - the inks transforming, blending and softening. These are colours chosen for their calming and healing associations. Rather than a dominant symbol, there are instead layers, nuance and translucency and with the resulting harmonies, an evocation of vulnerability and somehow, liberation. This is balanced by the rigour of her method; the discipline of restricting forms to only horizontal and vertical elements and with just one colour printed per day, over multiple sheets of paper. The minimal means lends poignancy to the message, for even when the sun comes up, I’m in trouble. Every Time the Sun Comes Up, I see double. The exhibition at AIRspace is an occasion to translate the printed works into a site-specific weaving installation. Relinquishing the crisp negative space of white paper for the gallery hollow of white-painted brick, is to adapt the hard edged certainty of colour and form to a more fallible space echoing with previous uses and occupants. Much is uncertain, and will depend on material aspects that cannot be completely controlled. This enables the formal spatial relationships of the work to be read as traversing into the uncertain terrain of human ones. It is often said, but no less true, how an eloquent and simple phrasing can remain, the song stuck in your head, long after the concert fades.
- Lisa Pang (Lisa Sharp) June 2020
[1] Sharon Van Etten, Every Time the Sun Comes Up (2014), Track 11 on Are We There, New York: Jagjaguwar / Ba Da Bing Records.
There was a busy start to 2020 with three installations before Covid-19 closed down physical access to exhibition spaces and overseas travel cancelled. As with plans for many people, the exhibition-residency for Murray and Burgess in Paris at Factory 49 May-June was cancelled.
#fuelled, diptych wall weaving at SLOT window space Redfern over January
REDRED BLACKBLACK BLACKBLACK BLUE Four wall weavings in PVC tape Gallery4, Five Walls Footscray Melbourne, February 22th – March 9th, 2019
RedRed BlackBlack BlackBlack Blue is an installation named after a poem. Abstract Poem, written by Robert Lax (1967) is itself a response to the paintings of Ad Reinhardt. On a white page, the poem appears as a slightly unstable vertical tower of words. With more white space than black text, much more is unsaid than said. It is a poem to be seen. Read aloud, as it will be to accompany the exhibition, it evokes the sensations of colour; of rolling reds held against and between the clipped drips of black and of blue, spoken colour as visualisation, pattern and syllabic syncopation. Three colour-words, four columns, and an internal variation form the rhythmic structure.
The parallels between Murray’s work and Lax’s poetry are apparent; not only as a material, visual echo of language, but also in the clear intent to work reductively. In common there is a distillation of communication by using the simplest elements and weighing the spaces between them. Whether single colours or single words, they are presented with measure, equality and economy.
Lax has been described as a Concrete poet, yet also as an Abstract Minimalist. Murray’s previous geometric works were eloquent with the language of protest. Eschewing the lyrical and the expressive in favour of the blunt reality of colour, line and plane, paradoxically, creates an opening, the space that Murray will work in to create this installation. She describes it as a way of working within strict parameters, through a process that is open to chance. Are Lax’s words sufficient to convey the myriad nuances of a visual art – involving scale, character of edges, straightness of line, texture of material and adaptations to the vagaries of site? These are the details that betray human interaction and continue Reinhardt’s discourse on the divide between art and life.
Lisa Sharp, December 2019
TIPPING POINT an installation of 100 purlins by Murray and Burgess at Factory49 5-29 March
Tipping point is the critical point in a situation, process, or system beyond which a significant and often unstoppable effect or change takes place. Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
Murray and Burgess reuse wood, once-were-trees, in all their weighty imperfection.
Yellow purlins of wood are suspended in air, temporarily stalled, waiting, their inevitable crashing to ground deferred while some decision or action can take place. Some have already hit ground, about-to-fall, poised in their unbalance, their point of tipping.
Compressed in-between spaces, making difficult passage between the in-your-face yellow.
Diagonal, something wrong, the complex grove of lines, grids, bar charts demonstrating the overheating. The verticality of human endeavour overturning. An alert to take action.
Factory 49 Opening 6-8pm Wednesday 6 November 2019
Main gallery: Black Vertical and Red Horizontal (lino print series)
This pairing of Factory 49’s two exhibition spaces enables artist Ro Murray to speak expansively from a reductive visual vocabulary made up of of dualities and the spaces between them. Returning to a signature colour palette of black and red on white, with rectilinearity reduced to horizontal and vertical placements, the distinct processes of printmaking and weaving interact unexpectedly as an anchor of human scale in site-specific installations. The creation of these transient interior spaces operates as a platform for an ephemeral architecture of protest. The spare language of dichotomy, presented in confined spaces suggests an urgent narrative, of stark choices ahead. Crosshairs is the title of an ongoing linoprint series, and the powerful colour and calligraphic constructions in the Main Showroom introduce the show and conceptually, the notion of targets (think climate action targets of current political debate). This series, Black Vertical and Red Horizontal suggests the vigour and irresolute nature of that debate as compositions veer between simple interactions of one or two elements to complex hashtag nests of multiple layers and pictorial strategies. Murray stresses the presence and place for imperfection in the work and pictorially, these point to imperfect humanity and the role of learning and mistakes. Another influence on Murray’s practice is Bauhaus weaver Anni Albers. Albers wove from a unique position, presenting historically marginalised womens’ handcrafted and textile traditions as equally modernist idioms. Up scaling the woven grid to bodily scale via a PVC installation situates weaving in a contemporaneity in which humans engage with environmental outcomes of industrialised modernity. Red line at fifteen hundred in the smaller Project Space is described by Murray as both a direction for art installation and a reference alluding to danger ahead. Its context here conflates the gallery hanging eye line with the weft (usually horizontal and secondary element of setting up a weave), again inviting a consideration of human scale through an altered viewing perspective, addressed within the compressed space of a small room. These resolutely linear works and interventions play with dualities, grid, scale, perspective and space as metaphors for confronting and reflecting upon the place and role of humans in shaping the future of the world. Perhaps, and as Lynne Cooke describes of Anni Albers, this means, of prioritizing the experiential over the didactic provides non-objective art with a way in which protest can meet pictorial abstraction, technology and architecture. - Lisa Sharp October 2019
Office Project Space: Red Line at Fifteen Hundred (wall weaving work)
#BURNBURN SELECTED FOR FISHERS GHOST ART PRIZE SCULPTURE
Opening Friday 1 November at Campbelltown Art Centre
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parenthesis of eight spaces
Hold Everything Dear is a call. A call sounding at variable volume, tone and modulation; anything from an injunctive invocation cried out loud to to something more like a muttering to oneself. This is the setting for the varied works in this exhibition. Eight artists present works that veer between the direct and politicised to the intimate and nuanced. These artists have responded generally to the call to hold everything dear and more specifically, to the eponymous book of essays by Berger (2008).* There is a sense of pause too – of restrained urgency and reflection, as while the Berger writings are lucid they are also overwhelmingly anguished and were published well over a decade ago. In many ways this exhibition is an opportunity for crafting a wealth of visual responses to the despair of contemporary terrorism, occupation, war and ethics of global power in the intervening time. Facing the enormity of such issues, in an era of increasingly fragmented and globalized humanity, the art made simply reflects the human range.
As a country was invaded, and with no peace in sight, an artist wrote to John Berger, The world today is hard to look at, let alone think of**. And yet, this is what artists do. What is it to Hold Everything Dear?
There are certain moments of looking at a familiar mountain which are unrepeatable. A question of a particular light, an exact temperature, the wind, the season. You could live seven lives and never see the mountain quite like that again; its face is as specific as a momentary glance across a table at breakfast.
While mountains are massive, immovable (perhaps even immortal) there is this overwhelmingly tender observation - that which is valuable, precious, held dear, the Everything – is not only faceted but is nearby, in daily lives and histories. This is also a feature of the Berger book; where we are led to face a mountain of pain, to ask how to continue without any plausible vision of the future? A stark question, placed beside lines of achingly lovely poetry (by Gareth Evans) for gentle answer;
the jug of this life, as it fills with the days / as it sinks to become what it loves***
Murray’s Study for the Miner’s Hut fixes the gaze on the mountain as a heap of coal - a dark, loaded and heavy history of coal dependency. By tying titles to hashtags and contested mine sites, the work directly references contemporary sites of contest and activism around coal mining. While the hard-edged geometric forms, the warning colours of black and red signal the language of protest and of clear-cut positions on the issue (#keepitintheground), these are ameliorated by materials and context. RAM Board is a temporary flooring product, produced from recycled elements, the paint is a gloss Weathershield and the miner’s hut itself is no longer in use, but a historical museum display in Sydney’s Blue Mountain, elements which suggests the future is fraught and intertwined with a myriad of other environmental issues.
A number of the artists have utilised recycled and found materials or objects to allude to the passing of time, the prevalence of memory and to evoke a sense of loss and nostalgia for place and people. This repurposing is a way of reseeing the mountain. Materials such as paper, textiles, leather, timber and glass are versatile for their ability to hold time within; marks of wear becoming a part of its structure. Through processes that are tactile and draw on craft traditions, they offer a chance to leave traces of the hand, as touch.
Belgiorno’s work Vessels is an installation of seedpod or cocoon-like objects, hollow and torn open, suspended from branches. As dried and hollowed husks these organic forms seem to reference a past time of fertility or fruiting while their present barrenness suggest vulnerability and perhaps, function also as metaphors for the uncertain present. Washi paper, itself handmade, was sourced from drawings, dampened and torn to transform into remade forms. In this way the torn drawings (of valued objects) are a condensed material archive of the past but also, contain the observation that mere things are ephemeral and transient. The forms deliberately mirror and repeat familiar natural ones, the rounded surfaces, earthy palette and uneven textures so descriptive of life cycles, reproduction, renewal and healing.
The innate tactility of textiles and their ability to describe the comfort of touch is also present in Burgess’ Fit our vision to the dark, an installation about home. Using the malleability of fabric and the scale of the louvre windows in the artist’s own home, the work forms an impression of architecture-as-memory. The window, a structure for looking outward, from a safe place into an uncertain one is echoed, but in tulle and distorted timber. Working from a deeply personal context, of a home about to be vacated, Burgess conjures that which is dear when physical spaces are left - the warmth of of domesticity, of humans filling architecture, of our need for shelter deepened by the joy of familial rhythms, peace, connection and the growth of children into adults. Foreshadowing loss and its attendant anxiety, the window is the setting for seeing that dark mountain; the sheer quality of tulle and the misshapen grid making the view beyond hazy and indistinct.
The Contemplation of Loss by Fernando takes the form of delicate new life – green shoots sprout freely from a clay cooking pot that was used in the artist’s father’s restaurant. The death of a parent and the inevitable legal and other formalities that followed, led to a series of artworks that literally grow from loss as seeds are sown on to paper pulped from shredded copies of the artist’s father’s last Will and Testament. As the seeds are watered, plants grow from the document. Grief, private and public, emblematically return the text to soil while the fecundity of growth reveals the continuance of life, renewal and hope. This contemplation imbues the personally felt loss with the empathy of shared celebration.
Hold everything, Dear / Discard something inexpensive / Keep something special / Forsake nothing precious / Hold, everything dear! In Burdett’s own words, the cadence and emphasis shifts – it is all a question of nuance and intonation. Describing the array of materials presented in the work as originating from the fragmented diaspora of the artist’s own existence: the collected objects, images, bones, hides, rural fragments, artefacts, slogan-like snippets of text, textures and crafted textiles are displayed in considered arrangements. This, and the uniform palette of antique patina lends the work the quality of a diorama or movie set, and the narrative proceeds outwards from the autobiographical to the communal, from a life to lives, from the personal to the political and from the symbolic to the real. Wearing the marks of age, there is a chair for sitting and looking, and bizarrely, a Mexican puppet that looks back (for the artist, a personal symbol of the voyeur).
Running through Berger’s essays are deeply felt personal stories: the devastation of loss mingled with the warmth of family comforts and transformative art and poetry. Other artists in the exhibition seek to access and portray the human condition by depicting and engaging with familiar human narratives, essentially stories of people.
Meisner’s work consists of small-scaled human figures, photographic prints enlivened by brightly coloured layers of collaged fabric in Perspex. Standing on plinths, these figures move us back and forth between considering the individual and the crowd. Somehow, they are at once anonymous and recognisable, collective and differentiated, achieving an oscillation of form and concept. Driven by a strong sense of empathy and concern for the global phenomena of displaced populations, Meisner works inwards from these broad themes to consider the impact of forced relocation, migration or simply movement, on the individuals photographed. Humans and humanity are depicted in a permanent state of contemplative transit.
Connolly’s figurative paintings and sculptures are influenced by an ongoing interest in folk, tribal, primitive and outsider traditions of figuration. These human and quasi-human figures are depicted in an active chaos of bright colour and texture, displaying energetic mark making and a variety of materials. Paint, collage, wire and ceramic elements are meshed, woven and joined together. Most of the figures feature an open mouth and it is interesting to imagine them giving full voice to the exhibition title, Hold Everything Dear, in full throated chorus.
Lees will be making an interactive work, engaging with visitors to the exhibition, here and now. Building on a recent participatory project in a hospital environment, Lees intends to make a wall of written notes; A Little Good for this gallery within a school. The invitation (also issued over social media) is for people to share the good by contributing a sentence describing a particular moment that has brought joy. These will be displayed and transcribed as the exhibition progresses. Lees sees her work as a balm to the prevailing stream of negativity in the media. The pause, to be created by the work, will be time - time to sit, reflect and write, enabling not just the artist’s hand, but a host of other hands, to be visible in the final work.
This exhibition can be seen to function as a Greek chorus. They look at the mountain. They cannot affect the outcome of what is being shown. They do not interpret. They question, listen, observe and then give voice to what the viewer may, more or less inarticulately, be feeling.****
8 voices; female voices, singing hold everything dear.
* Berger, John, Hold Everything Dear - Dispatches on Survival and Resistance, 2007: Vintage Books
(2008), New York, USA
** Ibid. 55
*** Extract from Gareth Evans, Hold Everything Dear for John Berger (2005), Ibid. viii - ix
**** Berger, Ibid. 87
Ro Murray Study for Miners Hut I,II 2019 collage on Ram Board, each 92x280cm
Five artists come together to reflect through their art on what it is to be living in these rapidly changing and seemingly unstable times, in a visual ‘falling down’ and ‘gathering up’. Unified by concept, differing materials, processes and approaches are used to narrate the rhythms of falling, then rising, leading to contemplations on resilience and community. The works range from fragile paper drawings, enigmatic sculptural objects, large graphic installations, colour constructions and performance.
Group exhibition hold everything dear at Grace Cossington Smith Gallery Opening 2-4pm Saturday 18 May Deborah Burdett, Mandy Burgess, Michelle Belgiorno, Michelle Connolly, Renuka Fernando, Tilly Lees, Jo Meisner and Ro Murray.
Over March, Ro worked at the art residency BigCi Bilpin in preparation for her installation #keepitintheground selected for Sculpture at Scenic World opening 12 April. Study for the Miners Hut
Ro’s Artist talk at the BigCi open day.
#keepitintheground at the Miners Hut, Katoomba.
Murray and Burgess started the year at Factory49 with the installation Sort it Out.
Murray and Burgess’s installation extends the act of making into a challenge to document the content of their yellow bins. They playfully approach sculpture using discarded rural metal fragments to make symbolic open vessels. Their process-oriented constructions are drawings in space.
Murray and Burgess exhibited Fortress as part of North Sydney Art Prize. This work is a reminder that the environment needs to be protected from the damaging effects of man-made climate change. There will be more frequent and extreme temperatures and winds which cause devastating bushfires, droughts and cyclones.
Ro and Mandy Burgess start Factory 49 calendar with their installation sort it out Opening 6-8pm Wednesday January 30. The collaborators extends the act of making into a challenge to document the content of their yellow bins. They playfully approach sculpture using discarded rural metal fragments to make seven symbolic open vessels. Their process-oriented constructions are drawings in space.
Sort It Out
The collaborators have been accepted finalists with Fortress for the North Sydney Art Prize, the Coal Loader Site at Waverton, opening 2 March until 17 March. ‘Fortress’ is a mini forest of seven dead trees with yellow wooden tree collars as a stark reminder that the environment needs protection from the damaging effects of man-made climate change. There will be more frequent and extreme temperatures and winds which will cause devastating bushfires, droughts and cyclones.
2018 had an exciting finish to the year for Ro with works on her dead-filed architectural negatives selected for several art prizes.
Midden 2017, ink and collage on tracing paper, 74x140cm, was selected finalist for Blacktown City Art Prize, image credit David Roche
Beside the Park 2018, dye sublimation print on aluminium, was selected finalist for Greenway Art Prize
Section CC 2017, ink and collage on tracing paper, 72x100cmm, was selected finalist for Grace Cossington Smith Award
Following her Solo exhibition at Factory49, Ro continued to develop her red and black geometric series. #liddell acrylic mural on marine ply (five panels), 240x600cm, carpark of Look Printing, Albion Street Leichhardt.
#yallourn acrylic mural and assemblage on timber, 240x260x360cm, Office Showroom Factory49
