explores the expanding borders of the artists studio space and how 'iso+covid+19+++' has impacted the production, reception, aesthetic and virtual possibilities of my ideas-led painting praxis
Virtual Exhibition: Limited Edition, Digital Prints, Size Varies.
new TIME SPACE is an ideas-led visual art project that has been shaped by the online teaching and learning programs that I delivered during the global, COVID 19 pandemic.
The proposed large-scale abstract oil paintings and video installation address the shifting modalities that exist between the disciplines of drawing, painting and video and the interchangeable visual dynamics that characterise pictorial and digital space. As a body of work, the imagery provides the temporal-spatial circumstances to reimagine how painting, as a primary discipline can be further expressed and extended when modalities and materials intersect.
The introduction of virtual space and digital drawing tools to my practice proved to be the catalyst that transformed how I thought about image-making, the aesthetic direction and methodologies that I employ in my approach to painting. As a binary pairing, my abstractions negotiate pictorial and digital space to document and influence haptic [differences] and record the gestural interplay between brushstroke, digital mark-making, colour and form that map pictorial space to reveal the structure and internal order of the painting process.
As a multi-modal system of representation, the dimensions of both canvas [large] and screen [small] offer a perspective on how interdisciplinary practice affects finding pictorial form through often disparate but, workable relationships. At the same time, the imagery offers insight into my thinking, ideas and how bodily and other experiences are registered through the act of painting itself.
Gleanncreag Aite 2020 [Glenrock Place] Oil Paint and Graphite and Beeswax on Khozo Paper
Drawing into Painting #1, 2020, Limited Edition Digital Print: acrylic underpainting, digital drawing, size varies.
Drawing into Painting #2, 2020, Limited Edition Digital Print: acrylic underpainting, digital drawing, size varies.
ERASURE the University of Newcastle Gallery, 17 JULY - 24 AUGUST 2019 3 Newcastle based female artists' explore the nuances of the act of erasure in their art practice
The Presence of Absence, 2019, 158x133cm, Mixed Media on Archival Paper
"Erasure is never merely a matter of making things disappear: there is always some detritus strewn about in the aftermath, some bruising to the surface from which word or image has been removed, some reminder of the violence done to make the world look new again". Brian Dillon The Revelation of Erasure”, Tate Etc., accessed June 22, 2019 https://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/ revelation-erasure
THE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE: ACTS OF ERASURE 2019
Erasure, 2019, The Presence of Absence, Khozo Paper, Pigment, Spray Paint, 80x80cm, Signed Verso
The abstract works of art produced for the exhibition, titled, Erasure, the Newcastle University Gallery, 17 July – 28 August 2019 collate the artist, Annemarie Murland's deep interest in how Modern Art History and subjectivity intersect. The picture plane acts as a repository where drawing, painting, and sculpture interconnect in an evolving and dissolving spatial and material inquiry is at the crux of this series of works of art. The material relationship between form, aesthetics, and abstraction is shaped by the artists' creative expression that is located in the material properties of abstraction. As part of her practice, Murland employs traditional and experimental drawing and painting techniques to extend the specificity and characteristics of the media. To that end, a process-material co-dependence absorbs and records the artists 'thinking through making' methodology that when represented in equally represented terms has the capacity to affect the senses and deliver the viewer with felt, experience.
Approaching erasure as a productive form of destruction, Annemarie Murland’s works take the idea as a cue for engaging with the tactile properties of materials. Crossing the boundaries between drawing, painting and sculpture, a number of her works look like scrunched up pieces of paper. This conjures the idea of erasure in terms of thoughts jotted down on paper only to be later discarded. Everyday matter, such as beeswax and fabric are explored alongside traditional art materials, including chalk, pigment and paint, expanding the limits of what painting and sculpture can be. The immersive scale of some of the works underlines Murland’s interest in physical experience as a way of understanding the world around us. These works are simultaneously fragile and monumental. In her practice, the process of making is pushed to the fore, an intimate conversation that Murland conducts with her materials.
Erasure: 2019, The Presence of Absence, Mixed Media over Muslin over Khozo Paper, 70x70cm, Signed Verso
REIMAGINING THE CANON
an international gender inspired group exhibition, October 23 - 17 November 2019, the University of Newcastle Gallery, Callaghan Campus. Curator Annemarie Murland PhD
Artist Statement, Reimagining the Canon, 2019
Annemarie Murland is a Scottish artist who creates large abstract works of art that speak of felt experience through the physical and material properties of her chosen medium: painting, experimental drawing, sculpture or in some instances, the lens of the camera and video screen. Murland has chosen painting as an installation for this exhibition with a work of art, titled, Homage: Interior Scroll. This image is an expression of how the artist thinks, feels and communicates her memories of growing up in a largely sectarian part of Glasgow. An important aspect of the artists' practice is that it prioritises material experience over language, an irony that is played out upon the picture plane. Ambiguity is a feature of this work and is illustrated in the decidedly feminine aesthetic where fluffy pink and white forms float atop homespun graffiti, etched into the translucent white muslin support. A discordant use of traditional and experimental painting materials blend to deliver the viewer a mind-body experience.
Annemarie Murland, Treasure, 2019, Pigment and Acrylic Paint on Muslin, 70x80x15cm, Signed Verso
Photography by Joerg Lehmann Photography
Annemarie Murland, Homage: Interior Scroll, 2019, Painting as an installation, Mixed Media, 155x183cm, Signed Verso
DRAWING INTO PAINTINGS MUSCULAR HISTORY weaving stories yet untold
This body of Abstract works on Japanese Khozo paper, titled: Drawing into Paintings Muscular History, MMXVIII, invites the audience to perceive and receive the imagery through a multifactorial lens. The picture plane presents a process-material interdependence in the shape of intuitive mark-making strategies that read as sgraffito. Alongside a personal drawing methodology there is a variety of interwoven bodily gestures that blend, divide and direct the eye towards no fixed point creating an all over spatial arrangement. Framed in a cool palette the works tonality, haptic process and a genuine exploration of paintings material identity provocatively illustrates how abstract encounters present when art history’s absence du feminine [absence of the feminine] is modified and expressed in equally represented terms. To that end, this series of works on paper share a collective title that offers both form and content suggesting a reading that goes beyond an aesthetic value. The artist presents not only a pictorial experience but a thought-provoking happenstance that highlights the historical soumis et dominant [submissive and dominant] character of the relationship between these forms, drawing, and painting.
Drawing into Paintings Muscular History, Sydney Contemporary, Paper Contemporary 2018 Weaving Series of Paintings
Drawing into Paintings Muscular History, Weaving 2, Mixed Media on Khozo Paper, 80x90cm, Signed Verso
Drawing into Paintings Muscular History, 2018, Weaving 1, Mixed Media on Khozo Paper, 80x90cm, Signed Verso
Drawing into Paintings Muscular History, 2018, Weaving 2, Mixed Media on Khozo Paper, 60x60cm, Signed Verso
Drawing into Paintings Muscular History, 2018, Mixed Media on Khozo Paper, 60x70cm, Signed Verso
INTO THE MYSTIC, SYDNEY CONTEMPORARY, PAPER CONTEMPORARY 2018
Curated by international artist and academic, Kris Smith from Artscope Australia, Shelf Life is an online group show that features works from invited artists who live and work in the Newcastle Region. The artists' have collectively responded to a selection of books that formed as part of the Newcastle Writers Festival, 2020 Australia.
A body of abstract paintings, entitled, Chapter and Verse by Scottish artist, Annemarie Murland sets out to recontextualise the self-reflexive content of Nicole Redhouse's book, Unlike the Heart, A Memoir of Brain and Mind through the physical and material properties of the medium of oil paint. The phenomena, felt experience provides the contextual and conceptual platform from which to view the authors allegory alongside the artists' bodily response to the book, which is framed by her ongoing unresolved temporal dilemma that seeks to find answers to the question of what it means to belong as a woman, artist, mother migrant? [Annemarie Murland PhD]
Chapter and Verse 2, 2020, Oil on Board, 35x24cm, Signed Verso
Chapter and Verse 4, 2020, Oil on Board, 35x24cm, Signed Verso
SHEEP PENS DREAMING Series 1-18 |Acrylic Paint on Archival Paper on Board, 34x25cm, 2018
​Sheep Pens Dreaming #2, 2018,
​Acrylic Paint on Paper on Board, 25x25cm, Signed Verso
Sheep Pens Dreaming #1, 2018,
​Acrylic Paint on Paper on Board, 25x25cm, Signed Verso
Sheep Pens Dreaming is a series of works of art that form as part of my research interests that explore the space that exists between memory, landscape, and migration. Practice, research and fieldwork in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland alongside the inner city of Glasgow's East End found a disparate connection with drought stricken Australia in the form of the Sheep Pen. An ambiguous and ironic motif that speaks of security, community and belonging presents here as a symbol of exile and loss through the juxtaposition of traditional and abstract compositional methods, techniques and material processes inherent to painting.
Finalist in the Muswellbrook Art Prize 2019. Sheep Pens Dreaming #3, 2018,
​Acrylic Paint on Paper on Board, 35x26cm, Signed Verso
​Sheep Pens Dreaming #4, 2018,
​Acrylic Paint on Paper on Board,
35x26cm, Signed Verso
Sheep Pens Dreaming #11, 2018,
​ Acrylic Paint on Paper on Board,
35x26cm, Signed Verso
Sheep Pens Dreaming #5, 2018,
​Acrylic Paint on Paper on Board,
35x26cm, Signed Verso
Sheep Pens Dreaming #6, 2018,
​Acrylic Paint on Paper on Board,
35x26cm, Signed Verso
Sheep Pens Dreaming #7, 2018,
​Acrylic Paint on Paper on Board,
35x26cm, Signed Verso
Sheep Pens Dreaming #8, 2018,
​Acrylic Paint on Paper on Board,
35x26cm, Signed Verso
Sheep Pens Dreaming #14, 2018, Acrylic Paint on Paper on Board, 35x26cm, Signed Verso
Sheep Pens Dreaming #9, 2018,
​Acrylic Paint on Paper on Board,
35x26cm, Signed Verso
Sheep Pens Dreaming #13, 2018, Acrylic Paint on Paper on Board, 35x26cm, Signed Verso
Sheep Pens Dreaming#12, 2018,
​Acrylic Paint on Paper on Board,
35x26cm, Signed Verso
Sheep Pens Dreaming #10,
​Acrylic Paint on Paper on Board,
35x26cm., 2018.
Sheep Pens Dreaming #15, 2018, Acrylic Paint on Paper on Board, 26x26cm, Signed Verso
Sheep Pens Dreaming #16, 2018, Acrylic Paint on Paper on Board, 26x26cm, Signed Verso
Sheep Pens Dreaming#17, 2018,
​Acrylic Paint on Paper on Board,
35x26cm, Signed Verso
Sheep Pens Dreaming#18, 2018,
Acrylic Paint on Paper on Board,
35x26cm, Signed Verso
A TRIO OF TRESPASSERS, MAITLAND REGIONAL GALLERY 15 July - 16 September, 2014
Hosted by Maitland Regional Art Gallery in 2015, A Trio of Trespassers was a group exhibition that politicised the individual migrant experience by exploring the notion of 'otherness'; an ongoing, intercultural problem that continues to affect Australian society today. As an evolving and dissolving metaphor, the narrative of displacement, a common and shared, felt experience provided the contextual parameters for each artist to retell their story. Curated as an installation, the exhibition presented a series of large-scale, interdisciplinary, monochromatic, abstract, drawings, paintings and works on paper to reflect an aesthetics of migration. Collectively, the works portrayed the absence of any inherent spatial or cultural borders through the rejection of high key colour and all references to the landscape as a symbol or form of identity. [Annemarie Murland]
Wrapped 1, 2013, Mixed Media on Arches Paper, 300GMS, 110x90cm, Signed Verso
Wrapped 2, 2013, Mixed Media on Arches Paper, 300GMS, 110x90cm, Signed Verso
Rooted Elsewhere, 2014, Oil on Khozo Paper, 180x155cm, Signed Verso
Rooted Elsewhere 2014, Oil on Khozo Paper, 180x155cm, Signed Verso
DRAWING across disciplines we find ourselves thinking through acts of wonder we find ourselves drawing
THIS IS NOT FLUFF an expanded field of study where time - space - thinking and doing collide in and through drawings materiality, past and present, to present the viewer with felt experience
This series of Limited Edition, Digital Prints, titled, This is Not Fluff, 2020 have taken their aesthetic and material cue from my interest in blending interdisciplinary painting and experimental drawing techniques as a methodology for making works of art that are at once harmonious but at the same time disparate. As a point of departure, process, intuition and a firm belief in how the phenomenon of osmosis can sync the subjectivity of interiority and exteriority through the body, time and space to deliver an aesthetics of isolation.
My drawing spaces rely heavily on challenging my existing material knowledge and engaging with interdisciplinary modalities to experience and explore alternative ways of drawing. Drawing in practice is the primary tool that registers a mix of thinking and making that when combined with the vehicle of abstraction, delivers a different kind of experience and understanding of pictorial space.
As an act of resistance to representation, drawing in an expanded field is the medium that suits my approach to drawing, which is fluid, spontaneous and intuitive. A mix of fibre textiles [knitted surfaces], painting and printmaking techniques along with 20 years of tacit knowledge have enabled the development of a personal drawing methodology.
To that end, expanding drawing's history and traditions is an important characteristic of my ideas-led research and studio practice. As such, visuality, as an overarching descriptor of my drawing practice that witnesses a blend of the body-conscious and unconscious, mark making, shape and line to deliver an experience of what drawing is and what it can become.
Interdisciplinary DRAWING: a question of materiality always revealing itself through the body, people places and things
Weaving Women's Stories, 2017/18, Traditional Drawing Materials, Ink and Gesso, on Paper and Polystyrene, 50x50cm, Signed Verso
Weaving Women's Stories, 2018/18, Traditional Drawing Materials, Ink and Gesso, on Paper, 50x50cm, Signed Verso
Weaving Women's Stories, 2017/18, Traditional Drawing Materials, Ink and Gesso, on Paper on Board, 50x50cm, Signed Verso
Weaving Women's Stories, 2017/18, Traditional Drawing Materials, Ink and Gesso, on Khozo Paper, 50x70cm, Signed Verso
Weaving Women's Stories, 2017/18, Traditional Drawing Materials, Ink and Gesso, on Paper and Polystyrene, 50x50cm, Signed Verso
Knitting Women's Stories, 2017/18, Traditional Drawing Materials, Ink and Gesso, on Knitted Surface on Muslin , 60x60cm, Signed Verso
Weaving Women's Stories, 2018/18, Traditional Drawing Materials, Ink and Gesso, on Paper on Board, 50x50cm, Signed Verso
Weaving Women's Stories, 2017/18, Traditional Drawing Materials, Ink and Gesso, on Paper 30x40cm, Signed Verso
Weaving Women's Stories, 2017/18, Traditional Drawing Materials, Ink and Gesso, on Paper, 50x50cm, Signed Verso
Weaving Women's Stories, 2017/18, Traditional Drawing Materials, Ink and Gesso, on Paper and Polystyrene, 50x50cm, Signed Verso
Weaving Women's Stories, 2017/18, Traditional Drawing Materials, Ink and Gesso, on Paper on Board, 50x50cm, Signed Verso
Weaving Women's Stories, 2017/18, Traditional Drawing Materials, Ink and Gesso, on Paper on Board, 30x50cm, Signed Verso
Interdisciplinary Drawing, 2018, Mixed Media on Paper on Board, 30x40cm, Signed Verso
Wrapped Up and Nowhere to Go 1, 2013, [Detail], Ink, Charcoal Dust, Gesso and Graphite on Arches Archival 300 GMS Paper, 90x110cm, Signed Verso
interdisciplinary Drawing, 2016, Ink, Paper and Thread, 30x30cm, Signed Verso
Wrapped Up and Nowhere to Go 2, 2013, [Detail], Ink, Charcoal Dust, Gesso and Graphite on Arches Archival 300 GMS Paper, 90x110cm, Signed Verso
Interdisciplinary Drawing, 2016, Mixed Media on Styrofoam on Muslim, 40x40cm, Signed Verso
DIGITAL MEDIA
Stories of Origin, Pope Joan et al, 2015, Limited Edition, Digital Prints, Size Varies, Signed Verso
STORIES OF ORIGIN DUBLIN New Voices, Dublin, Ireland: a visual research project, January 2015 Centre for Creative Practices 15 Pembroke Street Lower Dublin 2
St. Margaret of the Cross, 2015, Limited Edition, Digital Print, Size Varies, Signed Verso
Stories of Origin, 2015, Queen Victorious, Limited Edition, Digital Print, Size Varies, Signed Verso
Stories of Origin, 2015, St Agnes in Agony, Limited Edition, Digital Print, Size Varies, Signed Verso
Stories of Origin, 2015, Pope Joan, Limited Edition, Digital Print, Size Varies, Signed Verso
STORIES OF ORIGIN
and so it goes that the mother's, mother's story of what it means to be a woman alters as we birth our own babies and move through time and place
STORIES OF ORIGIN Centre for Creative Practice, Dublin 2015 returning to my ancestral home, a place in time and memory
Stories of Origin: Glasgow, Migration in Practice Glasgow Women's Library 2016, 18 August - 1 September, 2016
Migration has been a constant in the McLafferty family’s itinerant history. From their ancestral roots in Ireland to contemporary Scotland and now here in Australia, artist Annemarie Murland examines the complexities of intergenerational migration. Diaspora is a constant narrative that the artist employs in her practice and has been employed to structure the exhibition, titled, Stories of Origin. As a collection, a video installation and series of digital portraits and urban street-scapes of the Calton, 2007 come together as an aesthetic archive to reveal and record the artists lived and felt experience of cultural diversity and a longing to belong, both here and there.
The exhibition has developed over a 12 year period where a catalogue of documentary photographs of the Calton area of Glasgow [2007], black/white analogue and digital colour portraits of the artist’s daughters taken over a twelve-year period [2001- 2013] presents as a comprehensive body of work. The imagery, portraits and street-scapes are overlaid to offer a visual rethinking of who ‘we’ are in relation to the space and time that we occupy, and with that the stories of the past and those of the present become fluid and transportable.
In a universal sense, the collection is intended to pay homage to the generations of migrant women whose identities were formed in this place, Calton, Glasgow. As cultural theorist, Nikos Papastergiadis says: ‘The power of art, in part is fuelled by its ability to rip meaning from one context and insert it into another.’ And, it is within the context of image production that the origins of this story lie. [Annemarie Murland]
STORIES OF ORIGIN and Glasgow, 2007, The Dead End of Culture a series of documentary photographs of the Calton Area of Glasgow
From the Series: The Calton, After Art, 2015, Maela of Meath, Limited Edition, Digital Print, Size Varies, Signed Verso
From the Series: The Calton, After Art, 2015, Johns Bar, and Bride of Christ Meet, Limited Edition, Digital Print, Size Varies, Signed Verso
Stories of Origin GLW - Migration in Practice Video
Digital Prints on Archival Paper, Limited Edition, Digital Prints, a selection of these images form as part of Centre for Creative Practice, Dublin and Glasgow Women's Library Collection.
The Marian Thread
Dr Annemarie Murland and Irish artist Kiera O'Toole explore the impact of Catholicism on the formation of female sexual identity from an inherited Irish Catholic perspective. The Ends of Ireland, International Conference, UNSW, Australia, 2013. Essay | Performance | Video |
Glasgow: The Dead End of Culture, 2007 John Miller Galleries, Newcastle NSW
Glasgow, 2007, The Dead End of Culture Series, Dirty Dicks Black Market, Limited Edition, Digital Print, Size Varies, Signed Verso
To Purchase a copy of The Dead End of Culture follow the Button Link
Glasgow, sandstone and grey colour my recollections of a town that is warm in its hospitality, especially to the visitor. The city's identity is a complex weave of religion, sport, humour and generosity, ‘it’s miles better’ than anywhere else. Retrospectively, I have never truly left Glasgow, and after twenty five years, my connection and attachment to the place is probably stronger than it was when I migrated to Australia in 1991.
On a field trip back to Glasgow, 2007 it was obvious to me that the urban landscape of the Calton, my psychological home, was in a state of transition. Town planners and developers were, and still are, knocking down old structures and rebuilding in order to gentrify and capitalise on Glasgow’s inner-city commodity value. Well-fostered memories that have maintained an attachment to place are threatened by progress. Ironically, I record the facades of tired buildings with my digital camera, where recessed within the bricks and mortar are memories of dead parents and of time gone by. Documenting a fading sense of place, my family history and the colour of my soul are reflected in the graffiti-clad, condemned doorways that are reminders of all that will be lost when the buildings come down and the streets have no names.[1]
SHEEP PENS DREAMING: FIELD WORK THE ISLE OF SKYE 2007 documentary photography, recording the landscape while moving through space and place