Lyndsey Ingram is pleased to present a solo presentation of new work by British female artist Suzy Murphy.
Murphy describes her work as emotional landscapes, rich with energy, that explore her inner world. Murphy addresses the challenges raised in attempting to understand her conscious and subconscious self, as they coexist within her.
She has painted her entire life and many of her subjects relate to sketches done en plein air in the visual diaries she has kept since her youth. Murphy has travelled extensively and revisits specific places that hold deep resonance for her. She translates her memories from these journeys into monoprints, paintings and most recently, ceramics with her unique visual language drawn from her emotional responses to the landscape.
‘These are all self-portraits. I don’t see them as landscapes,’ says Murphy. ‘They are just me using the land as a dialogue of what I feel. They represent my internal landscape. They are things and places I’ve experienced and passed through. But because I paint from memory, I only remember a place in the way I encountered it emotionally. I talk a lot about memory and feeling in my work.’
She revisits these internal landscapes a number of times, across different media, until they are worked through in her mind and she is no longer compelled to paint them. Symbols recur - a red house, a lake, winding roads, a tree, formidable mountains, and her childhood dog Toby. Longing, displacement, solitude, joy, agency, the vastness of the human experience and our constant search for home all permeate her work.
