Lauri Lynnxe Murphy
Artist / Curator
Sculptures
I am intuitively drawn to bright colors, organic forms, a cartoonish quality. However, embedded within the abstracted imagery in my work are disconcerting objects, dripping and spurting, or sprouting growths or hairs. This unsettling quality, the line between seduction and repulsion, reflects these times in a different way than my more overtly political work, while still having the same concerns embedded within it. As Susan Sontag said, “Ours is indeed an age of extremity. For we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.”

This aggregation of marks and shapes is a personal language of signs that has developed in my work through the years. Blobs, fluid drips, biomorphic shapes and tumorous forms travel through multiple bodies of work, from drawings, to sculpture, to photography. I have an innate interest in the intersection of artificiality and the natural world, and much of my inspiration comes from the interior spaces of the body, disease, mutation, and otherness. Hidden within the attraction and comfort of color is the unsettling and perverse, disguised by the seduction of rich saturated color. I am interested in the beautiful only as a contrast to the grotesque, for, similar to death making life more meaningful, it is in these binary contrasts that we come to know the world we inhabit.

A Forced Collaboration Between Two Natural Enemies 2014 Wasps Nest, Honeycomb, Wool, Ikea Greenhouse, Dollhouse Floor

A Forced Collaboration Between Two Natural Enemies 2014 Wasps Nest, Honeycomb, Wool, Ikea Greenhouse, Dollhouse Floor

A Forced Collaboration Between Two Natural Enemies 2014 Wasps Nest, Honeycomb, Wool, Ikea Greenhouse, Dollhouse Floor

Materiality has content of it's own. Sticking to mostly natural materials, this work employs a laced-up Wildebeast hoof that morphs with painterly gradation of wool along a sisal rope, ending in a tumorous artificial ball. This work represents the next step in the earlier body of work surrounding genetic mutations and GMO foods. 2013 Wool, Rope, Wildebeast hoof, Leather, metal, found objects 120" x 5" x 5"

2013 Wool, Rope, Wildebeast hoof, Leather, metal, found objects 120" x 5" x 5"

2013 Wool, Rope, Wildebeast hoof, Leather, metal, found objects 120" x 5" x 5"

2013 Wool, Rope, Wildebeast hoof, Leather, metal, found objects 120" x 5" x 5"

2013 Wool, Rope, Wildebeast hoof, Leather, metal, found objects 120" x 5" x 5"

2012 Rope, Wool, Ceramic Shell 240" x 12" x 12"