ANN MURPHY ARTIST

I think there is use for a term for the root of symbolism in time, a term that describes

the infant's journey from the purely subjective to objectivity; and it seems to me that the transitional object is what we see of this journey of progress towards

experiencing. - W.D.Winnicott (1951)

 

This work takes as its point of departure the notion of the transitional object,

coined by Donald Winnicott, the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst, to

designate the child’s first ‘non-me’ possession. It occupies the intermediate space

between the internal psychic world (subjectivity) and external reality – between

subject and object.

 

In this work, Murphy investigated questions of contradiction and paradox,

creativity and destructiveness. As befits the territory of pre-linguistic, embodied

experience under examination, materials are selected for their intuitive appeal as

texture, alongside their transitional, or in-between qualities. Some of the materials

are raw and unprocessed, and their achromatic quality and fragility allows them

to be subtle and suggestive, to hint that they are hovering between emerging and

fading, like the Cheshire cat’s grin.

 

Concerned with transition, transformation, and process, the work is not fixed, its

flexibility and mobility allow for change, transformation and reinterpretation. It can

never be installed in precisely the same way twice.

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