Muck and running for many years, Liverpool Irish Festival‘s partnership with the Bluecoat Display Centre always presents an Irish creative talent. This year’s pick is Michael ‘Muck’ Murphy, whose work will occupy the In The Window space, alongside a retrospective of the centre’s other Irish makers.
We were drawn to Muck’s work, for many reasons. One: the talent of his aesthetic. Two: his connection with making things to live with from material which has been harmed and declared ‘dead’. Within the theme of departures, the idea of resurrecting materials to offer new futures, feels both environmentally responsible, whilst at the same time imbued with meaningful action and intentionality.
Many of you may know that The Bluecoat lost two, long-established ash trees from its garden last year. Thus, having Muck’s work at Bluecoat Display Centre nods to their memory.
My name is Michael Murphy and my work goes under the name Non Violent Cutlery. My practice is rooted in the use of traditional tooling, but aims to produce modern and innovative forms, in both furniture and sculpture. Much of my sculptural work aims to draw connections between the natural world and social and cultural issues.
I came to this line of work in a roundabout way. After years of studying law, and getting my degree, I realised that I didn’t want to spend my life at a desk; in the same breath I discovered that my hands had more utility than typing. I worked as a furniture maker in various studios, both in Sydney and Dublin, before striking out on my own to create pieces which resonated with me.
Muck’s expanding practice
In recent years I’ve been expanding my practice. Previously focused on furniture, I’ve included sculpture. Done with tentative steps, it was a little unnerving to leave the security of function and step out into the wilds of freeform and abstract concepts. My companion in this is always the tree I’m working with, the dialogue between me as a maker and this beautiful, felled specimen. I primarily deal with free trees which have been felled by storms or because they pose a danger. I get great pleasure in bringing new life to these fallen giants.
Turning Catastrophe into beauty
My work typically begins with a catastrophic event: the collapse of a tree. Often times it is one that has stood for hundreds-of-years, that has borne witness to social, cultural and environmental change.
It’s hard to be anything other than humbled by the sight of the growth rings on an ancient ash or oak. To be dwarfed in both time and space it puts a new sense of responsibility over me, as a maker, for the fruits this material will yield.
Never has that felt truer than it does now. Ash trees, which proliferate around Ireland and the UK, are on the precipice of extinction; a disease is eradicating them from our woodlands and hedgerows. My current body of work aims to celebrate the ash tree, before this beautiful specimen and material resource is gone forever.
Muck and objects
The work shown consists of turned vessels as well as carved panels. These pieces are made using age old techniques, carved by hand with gouges, chisels and patience. Much of my work aims to reimagine the vernacular of Irish furniture and objects; to conceive of what our material culture would be if we were not occupied for hundreds of years. Colonisation has homogenised much of the world of design, meaning much of the peculiar and wonderful is lost in the cultural soup.
One only has to look at the Arran Islands, and the garb of the women there at Europe’s most westerly point, to recognise that Ireland was a unique place with unique customs, language and material culture.
There was a time when our understanding of our land was imbued into each of life’s daily practices. Our language spoke to this comprehension in ways which — by comparison with English — leaves us culturally impoverished. That departure from being connected to the land, to nature, to the ancient ways is something which attracts me. It poses a “what if?” question, which serves as a great launching point for my work.
Muck and ritual
I wanted these pieces to feel like artefacts from a ritual. I asked myself: what would it mean to perform the Irish tradition of a wake in the context of a tree that has spanned hundreds of years of life? The pieces have a sense of familiarity to them. One could imagine they are useful, but the use remains unclear. The spectator becomes the pondering anthropologist to this new culture, one where nature is revered. The works exist in a visual binary bleached alabaster white and burnt black. Bone and Ash. I see the limbs of the tree, now exhumed, given new life and with that comes resolve.
Homage
These works aim to pay homage to the ash tree and to explore our relationship with nature. In response to the theme of departures, one of my turned vessels is relief carved on its surface to form a type of narrative tapestry. With points of separation, coastal divides, extrusions and recesses marking points of egress and the lacuna (unfilled space or cavity) that is left behind.
It’s hard for me to fathom that I am witness to the extinction of a tree that has lived for millennia on this land… That in my short lifetime it will disappear and that my children won’t know it, in much the same way that the elm is foreign to me but familiar to my parents.
I hope that my work serves to remind viewers that they are custodians of the natural world and to engage in the ritual of stewardship and observation.