Quiet Moments Made Audible: Deirdre Murphy’s Gradients of Growth
By Cindy Stockton Moore
Deirdre Murphy’s Gradients of Growth feature three concentric bodies of work –painting, printmaking and sculpture – grounded in observation and revolving around change. Each work emanates from a singular point – an experience of hyperlocal flora and fauna – and ripples outward, creating a wider spectrum of understanding and appreciation of the natural world. Deeply invested in collaborative scientific inquiry, Deirdre Murphy is an informed and responsive artist who celebrates the splendor of the landscape while simultaneously calling to attention its precarity.
The painting series at the core of this exhibition began during the artist’s residency at Shavers Creek Environmental Center. While exploring the site, she witnessed an abandoned cavity nest carved in a standing tree. The hole left behind formed a ready-made framing device, a portal to view the landscape from a fresh perspective. Through this organic aperture, Murphy refocuses the traditional en plein air painting – switching from the point of view of the painter to that of the bird – decentering the human narrator. This vantage shift is more than a pictorial strategy; in the light of the current climate crisis and species decline, it envisions a way forward, towards an ecology of hope.
Murphy’s ‘birds eye view’ is achieved not through distance, but through up-close, experiential empathy. The color is heightened. Bright and saturated ombre blends reflect liminal hours – sunset, sunrise, aurora borealis – and reference enhanced hue perception, the more-than-human color receptors allowing birds to perceive a wider spectrum of light. The power of Deirdre Murphy’s work lies in her ability to translate scientific knowledge to visual wonder, based in deep observation and renewed curiosity.
In the Contemporary Herbarium series, Murphy utilizes the centuries-old Renaissance botanical technique of pressing and indexing plant specimens. Updated in vibrant hues, the works on paper are arranged in Newton’s nine-step prismatic scale, an unwoven rainbow of ROYGBIV. Historical herbaria – like the Trembley Collection at Lehigh University – are used by climate change scientists to track changes in environment; they can detect decline in biodiversity and measure the health of regional species. The artist’s version of this paper garden uses a direct monoprinting technique to capture hyperlocal, East Coast pollinator species. These recognizable – but often-overlooked – plants sustain migratory birds on their travels. The samples used in the series were grown in Murphy’s own garden, where she is modeling the potential for positive environmental impact on the personal level. In Contemporary Herbarium, Murphy employs unexpected color, direct one-to-one scale, and delicate chine collé printmaking techniques to attract our attention – hand-crafting beautiful invitations to realizable change.
Punctuating the gallery space with three-dimensional color, the artists’ latest series of sculptural nests are further evidence of quiet, collective change. Created with a time-consuming porcelain slip-casting method, the delicate forms are made directly from abandoned nests; the woven twigs – assembled first by birds – are burned away in the process of ceramic firing, leaving only a hollow shell. Some of the original nests – now ghosts in the small ‘confections of color’ – were gathered by Murphy outside of her wooded studio, a sustained, mutually beneficial residency with Lower Merion Conservancy. Other nests were brought to her by neighbors and friends. This unseen network of collaboration – with the birds, with the community – widens the conversation about shared habitat and resources; it works against a world-view of scarcity and towards a vision of mutual stewardship and connection. In Deirdre Murphy’s Gradients of Growth, we experience an expanded spectrum of care, rooted in the joy and wonder of the natural world.