ANN MURPHY ARTIST

Fugue state is a psychiatric term for a state of dissociation and disorientation, in which a person temporarily loses the sense of who and where they are, a kind of rupture in the sense of continuity and identity. In the daily transition from sleeping to waking, we may likewise briefly apprehend the undoing of

identity, the fragility of the illusion of the permanence and unity of our sense of

self, before we gradually reassemble the fragments of our identity and recover

ourselves.

 

The work Overture directly quotes Marcel Proust’s exquisitely nuanced examination of these fluctuating states of consciousness. Swann’s Way (Volume I of Remembrance of Things Past) opens with a prelude on sleeping

and waking, suggesting that it is at such moments that a reversibility of time

and the undoing of the self can be experienced most clearly.

 

Light is incorporated as a crucial element in these fragile sculptural installations, which seem to be absorbed into the space, the play of light both revealing and concealing as it changes throughout the day. The delicacy and

transparency of the materials - silk paper, porcelain and silver wire - contributes to the illusion that they are hovering between emerging and dissolving, between unity and fragmentation, becoming and un-becoming.

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