Idris Murphy

35 The Bellingen River 2017 acrylic & collage on board 40 x 40 cm universe’. What is interesting about this letter is Rilke’s conception of things which ‘speak to you’ – ‘are you prepared to devote all your love to me,’ he imagines them asking, ‘to lie with me as St julian the Hospitaller lay beside the leper ... because [his] motive was love, the whole of love, all the love there is on earth.’ Such is our relationship to objects in the gallery: perhaps, this exhibition suggests, we could when we exit the gallery door take that reflective, maybe even reverential, sensibility back into the outside world. As the first of the pre-Socratics, the Greek Thales stands at the headwaters of all Western philosophy; he lived at Miletus, at the mouth of that great flâneur among rivers, the Meander. We know him only by reputation, through Herodotus and Aristotle, and none of his writings survive, except – if the words are in fact his – for one curious phrase: ‘everything is made of water and there are gods everywhere’. Perhaps this was merely mistaken observation: perhaps Thales, standing on the Milesian shore and watching the river debouch the alluvial silt that would eventually choke the city’s port, did indeed think that the very earth he stood on was made of water. We might remember, though, that for Heraclitus, who flourished fifty years later in nearby Ephesus, water was the embodiment of flux and constant change: perhaps that gnomic utterance of Thales is saying that while life is indeed all flux, all booming, buzzing, confusion, there exists everywhere in nature that which, if gazed at steadily, if listened to intently, can offer us spots of time, epiphanies, can reveal some deeper truth, some order, can offer what Heraclitus would term ‘logos’ . If we are to understand Thales thus then that sentence might provide a motto for this whole exhibition. Cosmos out of chaos, chaos containing cosmos: our minds shift between the two levels of being just as, John Berger says in his essay ‘Painting a Landscape’ , the painter’s ‘glance constantly moves between the scene itself and the marks on the canvas’ , just as we constantly negotiate between the object itself and the story it has to tell. ‘Objects no longer confront us,’ Berger writes. ‘Rather relationships surround us.’ This is certainly true of the work of Murphy and Martin, whose encounters with landscape are, to quote Berger again, ‘a ferocious and inarticulate dialogue ... [a] burrowing under the apparent.’ On another shoreline, Sir Isaac Newton once imagined himself as a boy ‘diverting myself in ... finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me’. Perhaps, with a different gaze, that pebble would have had more to tell than he imagined: perhaps, with a different gaze, we could see the world in a grain of sand. Gregor Sloss, Warburton Gallery, Edinburgh