Solo exhibitions
2003 Elements – Sculpture 2003, Gallery Gondwana at the Depot Gallery, NSW.
2002 New Works – Silver Bullet Gallery, Alice Springs NT
2001 12 Great Gift Ideas – Silver Bullet Gallery- Alice Springs, NT
2001 Famous Roundabouts of Central Oz – Eye Saw Studios- Alice Springs,
NT
1999 Elevated Plains – The Araluen Centre – Alice Springs, NT
1996 One More Mile– The Araluen Centre – Alice Springs, NT
1995 Blue Dog- Lyell Burton Galleries- Melbourne, Vic
1994- Emu Brand – Ryrie St Gallery, Geelong, Vic
1994 100% Tracey-24 Hour Art, Darwin,NT
1993 Trying to make Rain- The 5th Australian Sculpture Triennial, Vic
1993 Wired Up and Flattened Out, The Artists Garden Fitzroy, Vic
Other exhibitions
1993-99 The Alice Prize – The Araluen Centre for the Arts– Alice Springs,
NT
2000 Essential Truths- Telstra Adelaide Festival, SA
1994-97 Perpetual Motion – National Touring Exhibition
1996 Contemporary Territory- Museum & Art Gallery of the Northern Territory
1995 Continuum & Contrast – McLelland Gallery, Vic Curated by Ken Scarlett,
Vic
1992-94 Dame Edna Regrets she is unable to attend – National Touring Exhibition
Public Collections
Museum and Art Gallery of the NT, Darwin - “And the chooks blew all over
the road” or “I wanted a bike for Christmas”, “It could be the moon”
The Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs - “Comet”, “A Prayer for the man
with the fire inside”, “In the west”, “The other side of Mt Gosse”
Art Gallery of South Australia – “A Very Delicate Creature”
Grand Circle Foundation – Boston, USA: “Ayepe-arenye” (scale model) |
Gallery Gondwana (GG): Let’s talk about the show first
– the sculptures. What is the show about for you ?
Dan Murphy (DM): At the start of the year I began working on this show
Elements. I was tired of making panels and I thought 2 or 3 more and
then that’s it.
But then I got the idea, I don’t know why I hadn’t done it sooner, it
seemed so obvious to beat the metal and hammer holes into the panels.
And then I got really excited about making panels, it was like a whole
new palette, a new range of colours.
GG: This series of works are quiet different, there’s pieces like
Paddocks 1 and 2 and Hugh River that are reminiscent of your earlier
works, works that you are known for but this whole show has a lot more
texture and lacework to it.
DM: It’s an obvious progression to me it seems, not that I ever
planned to do it, it just happened. You can see the slow change, they
all relate together
GG: In what way?
DM: I’m still using the same materials (car metal ).
I used to make sculptures based on the colours I found and then I got
into trying make a particular picture so I needed to find the right
colours to fit the picture, and then slowly I got more and more into
enjoying the colours that were there and trying to find a way to use
those colours.
I started getting into the shadows the holes were making and in this
show a lot of the works are made from just making holes. I’ve stopped
trying to sew them up with wire.
GG: There’s less needle work, less wire work in this show
DM: That’s right, I’m just enjoying making the holes that I used to
make as part of the construction.
DM: When I was on holidays at the beach recently I was walking one
night and there were these clouds in the sky like ripples in the sand
and they made me think about how you get ripples in the water down at
the beach , in the sand, in the stones up here , in the sky, in the
sand dunes everywhere. That started me off hammering the metal to
create the ripple effect.
I use a nail punch and a big hammer like in the Milky Way - that’s all
just nail punch work.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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