Idris Murphy

6 Writing in Murphy’s catalogue for the exhibition I and Thou , Glen Barkley observes that Murphy’s practice sits between the Indigenous tradition of ‘inside’ and the European of ‘outside’. He doesn’t see the landscape from within as in the holistic Dreaming expressive tradition of Indigenous art, nor in the European tradition, observing the landscape in an objective way. Barkley explains, Murphy’s work is somewhere between these two ideas, or trying to. It is the struggle of trying to find a space within which to work that makes it interesting and worth pursuing. Murphy plays at the edges of reality and questions boundaries that separate. What is real? What is not? In the mesmerising space that he constructs, he combines both abstract and figurative elements in fields of sensuous, vibrating colour that synonymously suggest forms that are emerging and/or disappearing. The solidity of the real world is questioned. Interconnectivity seems imminent. Edges seem to dissolve. It’s tantalizing viewing. The complexity of the layered surface reveals a subtle process of creation. “It’s mysterious. I do what the painting suggests or gives me. Its an interactive process.” The impact of the image is compelling, creating ‘a poetry of feeling’. It rewards the patient viewer with Eureka moments as shifts in perception occur over time. Collisions of colour conspire with spontaneous brushwork to produce fleeting moments of striking beauty. Murphy’s formal aesthetic, while influenced by the Western painting tradition also draws from that of Indigenous Australian artists. In particular, the spacious painterly fields and figurative abstraction of Kimberley artist Rover Thomas and the bright, dramatic colour palettes and landscape view of southeast Arnhem Land artist, Ginger Riley Munduwalawala. Like them he uses figurative depictions of landscape symbolically. For Murphy in recent times, the tree has become an increasingly important element that he sketches onto his surfaces. As if to recall Buber’s entreaty to understand the interconnectivity of the universe: ‘The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no value depending on my mood; but is bodied all over against me and has to do with me, as I with it – only in a different way.’ Dr Marie Geissler Honorary Associate Fellow Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts at the Universiy of Wollongong 2019