Idris Murphy

34 unimagined country, merely one alien to the European imagination. The indigenous peoples of Australia had been imagining – or dreaming – that harsh yet beautiful landscape for 40,000 years or more. While Idris Murphy is an artist steeped in the European tradition, he also acknowledges that the awakening of interest in and the encounter with Aboriginal art in the 20th century has utterly transformed and re-invigorated Australian art and that no Australian artist can fail to have been affected by Aboriginal art and the ideas about the landscape it embodies. These ideas are perhaps best summed up by Peter Sutton in his book Dreamings: at one point he describes travelling downriver in northern Australia with a group of Aborigines when one young man indicates the landscape all around and tells him, ‘epama epam’, ‘nothing is nothing’ . The world was created by, and is still sustained by, the Dreamings, and all that we see are the marks that they have made: everything is intentional and imbued with meaning. As Sutton puts it, ‘there is no wilderness’ . An Aboriginal landscape painting is a representation of a representation. Sutton quotes the words of an artist from a coastal community in Cape York: ‘the land Is a map’ . In Aboriginal thought the distinction or dichotomy between the physical existence of the landscape and its internal story, its meaning, does not exist, but a post- Enlightenment European sensibility finds it difficult, if not impossible, to accommodate such ideas. Nature is there to be named, measured, quantified, used, it is food and fuel for our own paramount desires: beyond this it has nothing to tell us. Where it has meaning at all, as in art, as in poetry, it is meaning as metaphor, the meaning we bestow upon it: we claim, like Humpty- Dumpty, that it means what we say it means, neither more or less. Outside of us nature is a mere blind, booming, buzzing confusion. To get beyond this we must adopt a quite different cast of thought. ‘Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot’ : this is Stephen Dedalus walking into eternity along Sandymount strand. Dedalus, of course, is one who has gone beyond Enlightenment paradigms, or rather gone before, for his head is full of Aristotle and Aquinas, and even that phrase ‘signatures of all things’ comes from an alchemical treatise by Jakob Böhme. This passage, from Joyce’s Ulysses, is one that springs immediately to mind as we contemplate the works by Paul Martin in this exhibition, works inspired by other, Scottish shores, works which depict, or indeed contain, a similar assemblage of disparate objects ranging from seashells and seaweed and sand to banal shoreline detritus – Joyce has a rusty boot, Martin a discarded set of false teeth. Martin, too, seems to invite us to view what he has to show as at one and the same time physical objects, as being that which they are, and as being something else, a story, a signature, a sign. ‘The god whose oracle is in Delphi,’ writes Heraclitus in one of his fragments, ‘neither tells nor conceals, but gives a sign.’ In a gallery we can see, though not perhaps read, these signs because we approach the work with an aesthetic gaze, in what Stephen Dedalus, discussing Aquinas, calls the ‘luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure’ – luminous, and perhaps also numinous. We are arrested by beauty, by the refulgent glow of Martin’s triptych Remembering Lot’s Wife , the vibrant emerald freshness of Murphy’s Shadows and Pines, Turkey or his jewelled yet brooding Sliding Trees, Dam Reflections; we are drawn in, we look deeper, we see more. Perhaps, though stasis is not enough. In one of his letters, the poet Rilke points this up. ‘In order for a Thing to speak to you’ he writes, ‘you must regard it for a certain time as the only one that exists, as the one and only phenomenon, which through your laborious and exclusive love is now placed at the centre of the