DAN MURPHY

Interview with Dan Murphy

GG: What inspired Milky Way – people in the city may not be familiar with the landscape in the same way that you are.
DM: I first made Landscape 1 and there is a little white lacy bit in there and that is what inspired Milky Way.
After Landscape 1 was I was trying to figure out different ways of making the sky , the ground, the water and the stars all at the same time.

GG: Was Broken Sky another development? The back of the work is great, too
DM: I was mucking around with the metal and I used holes and bits of stitched wire as well. I didn’t have enough blue to do the whole sky in one colour so I had to chop it up and I called it Broken Sky

GG: The yellow ground in Broken Sky - what’s that?
DM: It could be Spinifex that grows in circles, or the funny patterns you get in clay pan areas.

GG: It’s a great piece because it actually combines a lot of your past and new techniques.
DM: That’s what I was thinking when I was doing it, I was thinking about how to make them all work together somehow.

GG: You’ve got all the big patches of colour. It has a great perspective – almost 3D, like Broken Sky or the Hugh River piece.
DM: In Broken Sky I wanted to make it swing around the viewer like you’re not actually looking at the middle of the painting - you’re looking at the right and it’s kind of wrapping around you on the left. The same in the Hugh River– you are looking out onto the horizon, the landscape and looking down at the same time. You are looking at the crow and you are the crow - you have the same perspective as the crow.

GG: How do you do that? Do you do a drawing first or do you just go with the metal ?
DM: Sometime I do drawings but I don’t draw well so I might do a vague sketch and then I’ll muck around with cutting up the tin almost drawing with the tin.

GG: I notice on one level you create pictures with the metal and on another level you strongly explore what’s going on with the texture within the actual metal.
What about Colours? What inspired this piece ?
DM: One morning I collected up all of the colours that I had lying around and chucked them on the ground outside the shed. I started wandering around thinking about what I could do and I turned around and had a look and thought “I’ve already done it!”
I just cut around them so they all fit together and then I put a square edge around it. It was totally accidental which is great.

GG: This show was inspired by Central Australia?
DM: Pretty much.
For Salt and Gibber I had found that bonnet and it had been burnt and the shapes and blocks of colours were already there. I brought it home because I liked the greyness and I didn’t really think about it as a piece by itself for sometime . I started hammering around the edges and then I just filled it all in.
It was inspired by Lake Eyre country where you’ve got a lot of salt pans, salt lakes and then there’s the Gibber country which is all stones – there’s nothing growing there. That’s what the holes are – the gibber plains, coming up to the salt lakes.

GG: Did you find that your work became more refined the more you used that technique? In Salt and Gibber and in Sand and Spinifex there’s almost an aerial view - the patterning starts to takes on the landscape so strongly.
DM: That’s the beautiful thing about car bonnets– that’s what I was really attracted to. I first started finding cars at Wingellina which is in the middle of nowhere, half way between Alice Springs and Kalgoolie. Any vehicle that got there had to have been through a lot just to get there; and then it’s left in the environment, just left, it may get burnt in a grass fire or the sun is beating down and it becomes part of the environment. It’s exactly the same as what happens to everything out here, the stones are like that, the earth is like that. Now I can pick up a bonnet like Salt and Gibber and I know that the car has been through that country I’m sure.

GG: That work is almost photographic.
DM: I was in the local café Bar Doppios in Alice Springs and I was talking to a guy who had just been in an aeroplane for the first time in his life and he was talking about painting, the aerial view you often find in indigenous dot painting. We (non-indigenous people) draw like that all of the time with our maps but we choose to just put the roads in and the fences, whereas in dot paintings indigenous artists just put the country in and all of the fence lines and roads aren’t important.
So I got it into my head to try forget about the roads.

GG: Then there’s a work like Shield Shrimp…
DM: We live about 2 km from Ilparpa Claypan, and we often go down there after it rains and all of these little shrimp come out and that’s what they look like floating around the water, they are only about 1 inch long

GG: What about Poles ?
DM: That was inspired by a piece of work my mum did. My mum’s a bit of a rat bag. Every year she’s doing something new like etching glass or making underwear, she’s always done that. She’s got all these treated pine posts and she’s been painting them and sticking them in her front yard and sometimes people buy them .
Anyway she sent me a pole and I stuck it outside in the front of the house. I was half way through making Hugh River and I got really bad conjunctivitis. I was sitting down feeling really sad and sorry for myself and squinting through my eyes and I saw my mum’s pole in the front yard and I thought that doesn’t look too bad, so that’s where I got that idea. Of course it doesn’t look anything like my mum’s pole but that’s where the idea came from.

GG: When did you first start to work in metal?
DM: Thirteen years ago. I used to have a little shack in central Victoria
and some campers had cut out a silhouette of a fish and a dog in corrugated iron and stuck it on my wall and I liked them.
I decided to make a little silhouette of a kangaroo, some flat dogs and then I went 3D and made kangaroos, not as refined as the animals I make now.
I sold my first works in Melbourne in 1990 at the Artist’s Garden Gallery in Fitzroy so I could get some money to go to Alice Springs for a holiday.
When I was in Alice I’d found some corrugated iron and made echidnas and sold my second pieces to Gallery Gondwana.
I went back to Melbourne and all these pieces I had left there had sold and they wanted me to do more. I was flat out after that.
I shifted to Alice Springs in 1994 .

A lot of the sculptures I made were inspired by a place I used to live on the Oonnadatta tack when I was 19, it was half way between Maree and William Creek - Albury Creek. I lived there for a year - there’s nothing out there.
Once I started to sculpt and work as an artist so much of what I was doing was to do with living up in that country so I thought I have to get back to the centre. I was really drawn to that space in central Australia.

GG: You’ve used many of your techniques in this work.
DM: There is a lot of sewing in that work, I can’t pick my colours like I was a painter. I have to find them and figure out how they’ll work.

GG: It must be a tough craft the stitching together of metal.
Yet your work is like needle work, it’s very feminine, very soft
DM: Yes and its really hard material. I like to work with barbed wire as well and make it look really soft, too.

GG: Do you only use found objects and recycled metal?
DM: Yes and I don’t change the colours on it so what ever ideas I’ve got have to be compromised and adapted because of the materials and the colours I’ve got. If I’m ever out bush and see anything I try and grab it and I drive around a lot looking for dumped cars in the bush around Alice Springs, but I’ve cleaned up most of the dumped cars around Alice Springs so now I have to go further and further a field, cars are getting hard to find.

GG: That’s what is unique about Central Australia and the outback. What do you see all over the bush? There are abandoned cars everywhere. What about the stories behind them? Is there a relationship between the landscape and cars in central Australia ?
DM: People are attracted to the material I use. Cars have all of these dreams attached to them, they are in everyone’s psyche. A piece I did sometime ago was called “Between Papunya and Ebenezer” , it had graffiti on one side which said “only one girl from Papunya” and on the other side “only one boy from Ebenezer “

Everyone has written in the dust on the back of a car and wondered where it’s been because it’s dirty, the dream of that big trek through the outback.
In this show I really wanted to fill the room with landscapes for people in the city who are all cramped in, give them a little bit of space
GG: A lot of the works in this show go beyond pure representation of the landscape – they are more abstract like Aqua Profunda.
Tell me about Aqua profunda that appears to be just metal revealing itself
DM: I didn’t do anything to it. It’s a car door and I found it out bush and I thought it was beautiful so I brought it home and I kept wondering what I could use it for, and I just couldn’t touch it. I ended up cutting it out and cleaning it up and then I sprayed it with a lacquer so it wouldn’t rust anymore and to give it a bit of a wet look, it looks just like really nice deep water.
I used to live in Fitzroy and at the deep end of the Fitzroy swimming pool in 3 ft high letters it says Aqua Profunda.
That’s the beauty of hammering metal – it makes me really appreciate the metal, the whole work and just leave it like Aqua Profunda .
I was talking to Rosalie (Gascoigne) years ago and she said that’s what part of her job was, and we both agreed that what we both wanted to do was make people recognize the beauty in everyday things they see around them.

GG: You’ve met Rosalie ?
DM: There was an exhibition in Darwin in 1994 commemorating Cyclone Tracey and they were collecting scrap & recycled pieces for the show so I put a piece in it.
Rosalie was at the exhibition …we got on like a house on fire.
Her work hadn’t turned up and I didn’t have a clue about what she did because I hadn’t heard of her before then.
She loved my piece and bought it and gave it to the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. It was called “And the chooks all blew over the road or I was expecting a new bike for Christmas – it could be the moon”

DM: What I really love about my work is that it is always really exciting. I can be working on a piece and then I’ll turn it over and the other side is great and I think gee I wish I could do that.

GG: Do you ever put energy into the reverse side ?
DM: Yes sometimes but it is really hard to do 2 sides at the same time especially when you have limited options on what colours to use.

GG: Is there any work in this show where you think you’ve got both sides?
DM: Yes, in Temple Bar – it’s totally different from the other side, there are more random patterns and they work really strongly on the back – it’s a mirror image of itself.

I was driving back home and as you come down the road you look straight onto the end of the ranges and the ranges in Alice Springs run in great big long straight line east and west and that’s what I was thinking about when I was creating Temple Bar and still exploring using the wire and the hammering - it all seemed to work in Temple Bar.

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