Annemarie Murland

Annemarie MURLAND

Weaving through knitted yarns that hold tight stories

Precious mother’s gift unfolds in broken threads

Stitching time back, when life was all but a

Fragment of the father’s eye

She moves through spaces dark to find rest

She sighs at last, home [Annemarie Murland, 2009]

Artist Statement

Integral to my art practice is a personal painting methodology where paint is woven into material form to translate the embodied experience of migration. The use of abstraction and high modernist painting strategies explore complex and personal signs and symbols, emotions and connections.  My paintings often refer to the landscape of memory, translating the fabric of the environment onto the ground of the canvas.  Here, I am able to possess and reconfigure place as it relates to personal identity. Layers of paint are meticulously applied to the canvas surface and are reworked to replicate the careful and rhythmic formation of a knitted blanket from a single line of wool.

My paintings appear as independent objects that are specifically arranged according to site. In my Doctor of Philosophy exhibition, A Long Road Home, the paintings were hung close to the ground with a gravity that reinforced their relationship to the earth or landscape creating a threshold of sorts. This dislocation in space elegantly echoes a sense of displacement that drives my art practice and the processing of materials. In surveying my art practice, the viewer is encouraged to acknowledge the physical space that is occupied by the body when navigating the gallery space.

ANNEMAIRE MURLAND

Biography

Annemarie Murland was born in Glasgow in 1962, a third-generation Irish Catholic migrant. Originally from the southwest coast of Ireland, her great-grandparents were turn-of-the-century economic migrants who came to Scotland in the early 1900s. 

Murland grew up in the city centre of Glasgow until ten years of age and then moved to a satellite-housing scheme called Easterhouse, where gang war and sectarian discrimination were part of her daily life.

After finishing high school Murland worked and travelled until she found a career as an international banker and forex dealer, looking after foreign investments as well as buying and selling international currencies.

Annemarie Murland migrated to Australia in 1990 and returned to study at the University of Newcastle in 2000 where she was awarded the 2005 University and Faculty Medal for her undergraduate contribution to studio practice.

While an undergraduate student, her work won the Directors Choice, Inaugural Painting Acquisitive Prize 2003, Maitland Regional Art Gallery and is part of their permanent collection.

Murland completed her PhD in Fine Art at the University of Newcastle in 2009 and continues to teach and supervisor both undergraduate and post graduate students.

Andy Devine

Artist Statement –

Andy Devine

My practice is focused on an expression of the inherent want to reconcile my geographic displacement with a need for a sense of belonging, by drawing on formative experiences. This displaced reawakening, constructed through gestural imagery of industrial landscapes and the circumstances of a personal narrative, delivers what is a reflection of self. The romanticism that I find in industrial landscapes is often contrasted with the disturbing and moody atmosphere viewer’s experience. I find this contradictory interpretation inspiring and somewhat confounding. I am driven to represent myself in the landscape and through self-reflection convey memory, nostalgia, melancholy, and the enduring sense of loss.

A Trio of Trespassers

The proposed travelling exhibition, A Trio of Trespassers ‘examines some of the complex phenomena central to the act of migration’.[1] Annemarie Murland, Andy Devine and Kiera O’Toole are new ‘Australian’s’ whose art practices explore the experience of migration and its subsequent diasporas. Navigating between here and there, present and past, inside and out, praxis explores a fusion of transient histories.

In their approaches to finding ‘material form’ the Trio’s visual observations are panoramic. Lying between identity and landscape, their tableaus converge as one, rather than from an inherited imperialist, cultural perspective. By reassessing displaced identities, Murland, Devine and O’Toole recreate representations that are transformative in their critique of cultural and social otherness in relation to terra australis.

The resolve of the Trio is a contemporary visual response, which serves to renegotiate the enduring loss that is inherent to the evolving and dissolving experiences of migration. As the work travels between space and place, new identities are forged and geographical borders are reassessed, forecasting an inspiring and interdisciplinary material outcome.

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[1] Darryl, Bowes, A Trio of Trespassers, Catalogue Essay of Exhibition: The University of Newcastle, Australia, 16 October – 1 November, 2010. 1

Trio of Trespassers

The proposed travelling exhibition, A Trio of Trespassers ‘examines some of the complex phenomena central to the act of migration’.[1] Annemarie Murland, Andy Devine and Kiera O’Toole are new ‘Australian’s’ whose art practices explore the experience of migration and its subsequent diasporas. Navigating between here and there, present and past, inside and out, praxis explores a fusion of transient histories.

In their approaches to finding ‘material form’ the Trio’s visual observations are panoramic. Lying between identity and landscape, their tableaus converge as one, rather than from an inherited imperialist, cultural perspective. By reassessing displaced identities, Murland, Devine and O’Toole recreate representations that are transformative in their critique of cultural and social otherness in relation to terra australis.

The resolve of the Trio is a contemporary visual response, which serves to renegotiate the enduring loss that is inherent to the evolving and dissolving experiences of migration. As the work travels between space and place, new identities are forged and geographical borders are reassessed, forecasting an inspiring and interdisciplinary material outcome.

---

[1] Darryl, Bowes, A Trio of Trespassers, Catalogue Essay of Exhibition: The University of Newcastle, Australia, 16 October – 1 November, 2010. 1

Kiera O'Toole

Artist statement

Kiera O'Toole

Cultures are renegotiated as individuals leave their place of origin, transporting notions and images of cultural identity, heritage and homeland, real or imagined, perceiving their new environments with compound eyes. Migration encompasses intrinsic histories, systems of beliefs, idealologies of landscape and environments. 

Being an Irish immigrant and artist in Australia raises questions of Irish identities within a postcolonial context where perspectives lay in the ghost of British colonialism. The studio praxis extends the personal migratory experience and explores the centrality of the Irish western landscape within Irish and Australian contexts, offering a visual response into the construction of Irish national identity. The ongoing story of ‘Irishness’ is informed by Irish and Australian narratives in their historic, current and future uses.

'Abaile' ,(Home)

Seaweed roots