Meghan Murphy

This soft-sculpture series is in response to my exploration of the performance and social symbolism of fine china dinnerware.

In my pursuit of contextualizing family heirlooms, I researched consumer culture theories of twentieth century America, specifically the concept of 'performance leisure,' and objects that bestowed social prestige.

In the social upheaval of 20th century America, fine china dinnerware emerged as a symbol of socio-economic status and domestic ceremony. 

There is an absurdity and grotesque element to the use of these delicate, hand-crafted porcelain objects. Utilitarian object or sculpture? Fine art or food trough? The typical role of fine china is to sit on display until (perhaps once a year) it is slathered in food. All the gluttonous evidence of this performance leisure is washed away down the sink, and the china is perched back on display again, until next year.

I wanted to make a formal dinnerware set in which the evidence of gluttony couldn’t be wiped away but would soak into the pieces.

Using the sun-bleached, time-stained curtains from my great-grandparents’ kitchen, I designed a formal, three-dimensional dinnerware set for two, along with hand-embroidered patterns evoking family symbolism, decay, and temporality. Throughout this project, I considered embroidery as an act of dissent, recording, resistance and the reparative, whilst also placing embroidery in a historical and contemporary context of feminism.

*I had wonderful support on this project from incoming RCA MA print student Carrie-Ann Stein. 

My paint-over series is an exercise in layering, multiplicity, duration, and embodiment of time; a means of capturing the void and as a study in the duality of past and present in ruins.

I utilize reflectivity in an attempt to feel what I don’t necessarily remember. In this series I use my own photographs of deteriorating structures on my family farm as the canvas upon which to paint scenarios, memories, and fragments of family narrative. I considered memory as ruins and architecture as bodily memory…just as it’s hypothesized that the body can physically store memory on a cellular level, I feel that the tissues of these ruins also hold memory…or unlock ancestral memory stored in my own cells. The loose, abstract painting approach is an expression of reverberations, or events, that may not necessarily have happened—the texture and color of memory, abridged by fiction, over the flatness of photographed history.

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My sculptural process is a tactile experiment attempting to turn “the inside out.” Through the process of making and unmaking there is a redaction and yet also something gained and clarified. I’ve engaged in this physical process as a ritual of reparation by trying to make the invisible seen, the uncanny tangible and addressing the unspoken elements of my narrative inheritance.

I initially sculpted a series of horse limbs out of plaster, chicken-wire and scrim. I sawed in half several of these legs with the intention of casting the hollow interior of the sculptures—the texture beneath the plaster veneer. This process involved several rounds of casts and moulds, evolving from hollow plaster leg to solid silicone limb, and finally a resin sculpture. Hollow to whole, inside-out, negative to positive space.

I chose resin as the material for the final pieces because it captures the duality, and juxtaposition, of what this process has represented for me: the resin leg is heavy and dense, and yet transparent…the shape is familiar and yet the texture has an alien, raw, decaying quality…something altogether new emerging from the past. The piece is a physical representation of how I perceive elements of my family identity—whole and strong on the outside, like the plaster legs, encasing a hollow, rough, raw interior. As the pieces that I’ve spent the most time on this year, I decided to display the legs as the centerpiece on the table of my Grad Show installation. The original plaster legs are positioned on the floor—like hollow husks from which the new legs have emerged.

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Once Upon A Time… in a placeless place…a ship arrives carrying many dreams.

How much does a dream weigh? It paces nervously, straining feeble tethers.

[Prophecy whispering indistinctly in the background]

Flaring nostrils in a world of steel. How do you open doors with hoofs?

[Hubris observes in utter delight, balancing the weight of an infant Memory—babbling nonsense—on her hip]

The yellow box is hoisted into the air and there is a suspension…of belief… hope…fleeting moments and an eternity.

[Fate exhaling in relief] 

One box is many. A multiplicity of boxes containing dreams containing horses. Sometimes the box and the horse overlap and the narrator of the story becomes the spectator.

Occasionally a horse is led across the deck of the ship, into the box, but when the box reaches the shore it no longer contains a horse.

Legacy is blind, and yet saunters forth in a manner that emphasizes his mythological tendencies. He explains to the befuddled onlookers that some horses—or dreams, if you wish— still remember how to fly.

These words live in the perpetual elsewhere, refusing to be conjured or contained. The plot loops over and over, and yet is never the same again. A continual becoming. What enters the yellow box emerges as something else entirely.

[The sounds of equine terror are drowned out by the incessant chatter of Inheritance. A twang of commodity betraying their apparent nonchalance at the spectacle]

[Truth, having seen enough, clasps hands with Fiction and turns away].