Discipline
Abstract
Conceptual
Digital / Light / Sound
Installation / Land / Site-specific
Kinetic/Mobile
Material
Found Objects
Glass
Mixed media
Other
Region
London
South West
Biography
Artist Statement
Charlie Murphy creates dramatic sculptural installations, performances and events across arts, science, public health, museum and community contexts.
She has an enduring interest in making work which responds to different aspects of the human anatomy, health, disease, psychology, relationships and brain function, often collaborating with audiences, scientists and engineers.
She employs a wide range of media, technologies and processes; from sculpture, projection and photographic and camera-less recording processes to choreography and participatory performance events.
Murphy’s practice is highly collaborative and interdisciplinary. For major project such as Anatomy of Desire (1999 - 2011), she collected casts from the interior spaces of desire, including the inside of mouths of kissing couples. Her popular kiss-in event toured festivals, museums and galleries including Venice Biennale (2005), Edinburgh Fringe (2006) Rotterdam’s Schwouberg (2002), Science Gallery Dublin (2010) and Science Museum London (2009).
Her large-scale participatory performance events have invited audiences to dance principles of cutting-edge dementia research (The Neuronal Disco) and perform London’s longest acrobatic chain of cartwheels (The Big Wheel).
Charlie was visual arts co-director of Created Out of Mind, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, artists, researchers and people living with dementias and their carers who were residents in Wellcome Collection’s prestigious Hub Space (2016-18).
Charlie contributed to multiple interdisciplinary research projects to raise awareness about the less known impacts of dementias at social, personal and cellular levels. The Created out of Mindteam’s research explored, challenged and reshaped perceptions of dementias to demonstrate the value of the creative process, deepening public understandings of the brain confirming the value of people with dementia. Impacts of this research included over 50,000 website visitors, 40 public engagement events, 6 visual art exhibitions & installations across the UK, 17 national media & broadcast pieces reaching audiences of over 5 million and 34 talks, panel discussions and creative workshops delivered across arts, health & science contexts.
Through Created Out of Mind, Murphy has a continuing collaboration with Professor Selina Wray and her dementia research team at University College London. They’ve evolved many innovative strategies and artworks to meaningfully engage the public and deepen understandings of dementia and the brain through immersive, interactive art installations and exciting performative events. See: www.brainsinadish.org and https://youtu.be/IeNCfKno3Ik?feature=shared)
Her ongoing collaborations with new technologist Robin Bussell explores innovative ways of using robotics to ‘draw’ light across a variety of large scale sculptural installations created from reformed scientific glassware.
In 2021, she worked with Robin and a team of neuroscientists from King’s College London and students from a special school in Surrey to explore their perspectives on neuroscience research into autism. They devised an innovative outreach collaboration Sunnydown Synaptic, which explored neurodiverse student experiences through explorations of brain anatomy, cell connections and circuitry. ( https://vimeo.com/651725051?share=copy0)
Murphy’s major Brains in a Dish exhibition and outreach programme (2022-2023) for Barnsley Museums celebrated the significant achievements of Barnsley born Prof. Selina Wray ‘s research.
Charlie is currently developing new artworks and innovative public engagement activities.in collaboration with scientists at Loughborough & Birmingham Universities and Kings College, London.
Major projects & exhibitions include Brains in a Dish (Barnsley Museums, 2022-23, supported by Arts Council England Lottery funding & Alzheimer’s Research UK); The State of Us (The Lowry, 2019-20); Message in a Bottle (Old Operating Theatre Museum & Herb Garrett, London, 2021); Normal? Festival of the Brain (Royal Festival Hall, 2017 and 2018); Anatomy of Desire (various locations, 1999 – 2011, Science Gallery Dublin & Wellcome Collection, 2011); THe Big Wheel for Big Dance (Tate, 2008); Edinburgh Fringe (2006), New Forest Pavilion (Venice Biennale, 2003); The Art of Tickling Trout (ArtSway 2001-2003); Light Sensitive (ArtSway, York City Art Gallery, Theatre Clywd & Nottingham Castle Museum, 1999) and Pandemonium Festival (ICA, London, 1996).
The ‘kiss-in’ is a live kissing performance – with a mission to examine and record every type and shape of kiss both as a sculpture and as a digital portrait. This cheeky and accessible live event invites all combinations of couples and groups of people to contribute a cast of their kiss. Dressed in dental outfits, Miss Murphy and her assistants invite, proposition and charm any combination of pairs or groups of the audience to contribute their unique expression of desire to the project. A dental casting material is spooned into their mouths and they are asked to hold their pose for 90 seconds until it sets. Each mouth and way of kissing creates a unique expression of desire whose wet; writhing forms are delivered like a birth from their mouths. The event’s aim is to collect as wide a cross section of kisses and participants as possible to amass a comprehensive survey of desire. The casts are subsequently transformed into erotic glass sculptures. Each unique kiss contributed may be created as sculpture and /or a digital video portrait.
Charlie Murphy’s epic ‘ Big Wheel’ performance is the longest acrobatic chain ever staged in London. This video presents rough documentation of this epic one off event created for the Big Dance Festival in 2008 in collaboration with three top London gymnastics clubs; The Harlequins, Robert Clack School and Ladywell. Inspired by the formal rituals and structures of public displays, this large-scale public performance transforms the human chain into an exuberent ‘Mexican wave’ of athletic movement – joining together and celebrating hundreds of individuals, groups and abilities. This canon of movement and sound references sports relays, chain gangs, political protest,playground games of ‘Tag’ and the pioneering pre cinema studies of human and animal locomotion by Muybridge and Marey to presents a powerful collective gesture of athleticism across infamous ‘wobbly’ Millenium bridge in the heart of London.