ANNEMARIE MURLAND FINE ARTIST & RESEARCHER
  • Home
  • STUDIO HIGHLIGHTS
  • About Annemarie Murland
    • Artist Statement >
      • Curriculum Vitae
      • Contact Us
  • Art Practice
    • Migration in Practice: Painting >
      • A Long Road Home: Ph.D. Exhibition, UON Gallery, Newcastle, 15 - 24 July, 2009. >
        • Painting a Multimedia Practice
        • Interdisciplinary Painting: Residency Box Hill Art Centre 2016 >
          • A Trio of Trespassers: Migration in Practice
          • East meets West: expressions in contemporary art, Galleria Tondinelli, Rome, 13 September - 9 October, 2010.
          • Structure becomes Image: the University of Newcastle Gallery 28 September - 13 October 2012.
          • Landscape: Mnemonic Scotland
          • Colour as Form: Abstraction, 2013.
          • Colour As Form: Landscape, 2013.
          • Painting the Past in the Present >
            • Portraiture: Jimmy Blue [migrant]
            • An Open Secret: repositioning abstraction, 2014.
            • Geography: Responses To Landscape, UON Gallery, Newcastle, 2 - 19 October, 2013.
            • Geography: Responses To The Landscape, GALLERY, 2013.
            • Out of Hand: The Depot Gallery, Sydney, 13 - 24 August, 2013.
            • Out of Hand: GALLERY
            • Not So Bizarre: Pop Up Exhibition, Studio 8, Newcastle Art Centre, Friday 14 - Sunday 16 June, 2013.
            • Field Work: Isle of Skye, Scotland, 2012.
      • Migration In Practice: Drawing >
        • Drawing As A Way Of Thinking
        • Interdisciplinary Drawing | Collage | Still Life | landscape >
          • Interdisciplinary Drawing 2016-17
          • Drawing into Printmaking
          • Drawing with Thread
          • Drawing as an Installation
          • Drawing: Selkie
          • Lines of Inquiry: marking time and place, 2013-14.
          • Drawing: Wrapped, 2011 - 2014.
          • Wrapped: marking time, 2014.
      • Migration in Practice: International, Collaborative Practice Led Research Projects >
        • The Migrant Woman Project 2018/19 >
          • The Book of Ruth: returned and returning migration
          • Glasgow Stories of Origin 2016 >
            • Stories of Origin GWL Video 2016
            • Stories of Origin: Glasgow Women's Library 2016
            • Stories of Origin: Essay
          • Dublin Stories of Origin: Centre for Creative Practice, Dublin, 2015.
          • Dublin Stories of Origin: installation
          • Dublin Stories of Origin 2015 >
            • Stories of Origin: Migration in Practice, Video.
            • Stories of Origin Portraits
      • Artist Residence >
        • Artist in Residence: Rankin Park Hospital
        • Artist in Residence: Mater Hospice
  • International Collaborations
    • Greetings From The Irish in Australia: An International, Collaborative Project, 2013. >
      • Greetings From the Irish in Australia: The Selkie
      • Marian Thread: a visual research project in conjunction with The Ends of Ireland Conference, UNSW, December 2013. >
        • The Marian Thread Essay: a homage to otherness, 2013.
        • Glasgow: The Dead End of Culture, 2007.
        • The Dead End of Culture: Documentary Photographs of Glasgow's East End, 2007
        • Publications & Academic Writing >
          • Migration in Practice: Poetry, After before White Rabbits
          • Academic Paper: Migration and Diaspora.
          • Academic Paper: Migration and Sense of Place
          • Glasgow in Context
          • Essay: A Trio of Trespassers: Murland, Devine, OToole
          • Essay: Lisa Slade: Annemarie Murland
          • Essay : Dr Aubry Byrnes
          • Essay : Pablo Tapia
          • Essay : Kiera O'Toole: homeWard bound
          • Commissions
          • Press and Other Things >
            • Dizionario degli artisti italiani 2015
            • Maitland Regional Gallery Art Mag
            • Irish Echo : The Gathering
            • New Voices Ireland Wall Street International
            • Meet the Artist - Glasgow Women's Library
            • Art Education Program: Pathways to Abstraction >
              • Project AM 730 >
                • Blended Learning: flipping the studio
                • Proposal: AM 730 PROJECT
                • What does ‘innovation’ within the teaching and learning of Painting practice look like. How can innovatory developments within the curriculum encourage painting’s potential as an educational and cultural force?
                • Experimental Drawing Intensive
                • What is Drawing?
                • Language and Meaning: Lecture Presentation by Dr Annemarie Murland
                • So you think you can't Draw
                • Understanding Abstraction Level 1
                • Dematerialisation
  • Home
  • STUDIO HIGHLIGHTS
  • About Annemarie Murland
    • Artist Statement >
      • Curriculum Vitae
      • Contact Us
  • Art Practice
    • Migration in Practice: Painting >
      • A Long Road Home: Ph.D. Exhibition, UON Gallery, Newcastle, 15 - 24 July, 2009. >
        • Painting a Multimedia Practice
        • Interdisciplinary Painting: Residency Box Hill Art Centre 2016 >
          • A Trio of Trespassers: Migration in Practice
          • East meets West: expressions in contemporary art, Galleria Tondinelli, Rome, 13 September - 9 October, 2010.
          • Structure becomes Image: the University of Newcastle Gallery 28 September - 13 October 2012.
          • Landscape: Mnemonic Scotland
          • Colour as Form: Abstraction, 2013.
          • Colour As Form: Landscape, 2013.
          • Painting the Past in the Present >
            • Portraiture: Jimmy Blue [migrant]
            • An Open Secret: repositioning abstraction, 2014.
            • Geography: Responses To Landscape, UON Gallery, Newcastle, 2 - 19 October, 2013.
            • Geography: Responses To The Landscape, GALLERY, 2013.
            • Out of Hand: The Depot Gallery, Sydney, 13 - 24 August, 2013.
            • Out of Hand: GALLERY
            • Not So Bizarre: Pop Up Exhibition, Studio 8, Newcastle Art Centre, Friday 14 - Sunday 16 June, 2013.
            • Field Work: Isle of Skye, Scotland, 2012.
      • Migration In Practice: Drawing >
        • Drawing As A Way Of Thinking
        • Interdisciplinary Drawing | Collage | Still Life | landscape >
          • Interdisciplinary Drawing 2016-17
          • Drawing into Printmaking
          • Drawing with Thread
          • Drawing as an Installation
          • Drawing: Selkie
          • Lines of Inquiry: marking time and place, 2013-14.
          • Drawing: Wrapped, 2011 - 2014.
          • Wrapped: marking time, 2014.
      • Migration in Practice: International, Collaborative Practice Led Research Projects >
        • The Migrant Woman Project 2018/19 >
          • The Book of Ruth: returned and returning migration
          • Glasgow Stories of Origin 2016 >
            • Stories of Origin GWL Video 2016
            • Stories of Origin: Glasgow Women's Library 2016
            • Stories of Origin: Essay
          • Dublin Stories of Origin: Centre for Creative Practice, Dublin, 2015.
          • Dublin Stories of Origin: installation
          • Dublin Stories of Origin 2015 >
            • Stories of Origin: Migration in Practice, Video.
            • Stories of Origin Portraits
      • Artist Residence >
        • Artist in Residence: Rankin Park Hospital
        • Artist in Residence: Mater Hospice
  • International Collaborations
    • Greetings From The Irish in Australia: An International, Collaborative Project, 2013. >
      • Greetings From the Irish in Australia: The Selkie
      • Marian Thread: a visual research project in conjunction with The Ends of Ireland Conference, UNSW, December 2013. >
        • The Marian Thread Essay: a homage to otherness, 2013.
        • Glasgow: The Dead End of Culture, 2007.
        • The Dead End of Culture: Documentary Photographs of Glasgow's East End, 2007
        • Publications & Academic Writing >
          • Migration in Practice: Poetry, After before White Rabbits
          • Academic Paper: Migration and Diaspora.
          • Academic Paper: Migration and Sense of Place
          • Glasgow in Context
          • Essay: A Trio of Trespassers: Murland, Devine, OToole
          • Essay: Lisa Slade: Annemarie Murland
          • Essay : Dr Aubry Byrnes
          • Essay : Pablo Tapia
          • Essay : Kiera O'Toole: homeWard bound
          • Commissions
          • Press and Other Things >
            • Dizionario degli artisti italiani 2015
            • Maitland Regional Gallery Art Mag
            • Irish Echo : The Gathering
            • New Voices Ireland Wall Street International
            • Meet the Artist - Glasgow Women's Library
            • Art Education Program: Pathways to Abstraction >
              • Project AM 730 >
                • Blended Learning: flipping the studio
                • Proposal: AM 730 PROJECT
                • What does ‘innovation’ within the teaching and learning of Painting practice look like. How can innovatory developments within the curriculum encourage painting’s potential as an educational and cultural force?
                • Experimental Drawing Intensive
                • What is Drawing?
                • Language and Meaning: Lecture Presentation by Dr Annemarie Murland
                • So you think you can't Draw
                • Understanding Abstraction Level 1
                • Dematerialisation
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Migration in Practice: the past in the present


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Annemarie Murland: A Long Road Home and Other Stories 

Author: Dr Faye Neilson

The recent work of Annemarie Murland describes a journey of displacement and readjustment. Using a variety of processes and materials, Murland tracks the shifting nature of her own identity to create works that are linked in a sense of nostalgia. The word ‘nostalgia’ combines the Greek terms for ‘return home’ and ‘pain’, it can be defined as “a yearning for a past period or place”. The artist consciously reaches into her personal past for touchstones, but moves through these experiences to redefine her sense of self. Janet Wolff observes a pattern of response to displacement, which can certainly be applied to Murland’s art practice, she writes:

Displacement... can be quite strikingly productive. First, the marginalization entailed in forms of migration can generate new perceptions of place and, in some cases, of the relationship between places. Second, the same dislocation can also facilitate personal transformation, which may take the form of ‘rewriting’ the self ...

Murland’s work explores migration. As she has stated, movement is a condition for migration and when we move between places, we necessarily forgo attachments. We are set adrift in both an emotional and a physical sense. Binary oppositions are created; here or there, past or present. In Annemarie Murland’s case the dominant binary exists between places, specifically Scotland and Australia.

In many ways Murland’s recent practice bridges gaps between locations and time periods. It tells her story. Murland is descended from a family of storytellers and the experience of migration is woven firmly into the narrative of her family history. Her great-grandparents migrated from Ireland to Scotland in the early 1900s, settling in Glasgow. Murland was raised in Glasgow and migrated to Australia in 1991. She now lives in Newcastle.

Murland sees art as a language that can communicate stories. Her artworks are narratives that navigate and translate what she describes as ‘felt experience’. Her recent exhibition, A Long Road Home, was made up of a cohesive series of individual works, each addressing issues of displacement, loss and identity.

In floating works on paper, Murland explores the physical trappings of memory. Here, the tactile surfaces of common household fabrics, such as coarsely knitted blankets,become delicate weavings of personal history that connect the artist to her homeland. Murland speaks of ‘embodied texture’ as a vehicle for memory. The embossed paper surface, used in works such as Agnes (2008) and After Memory (2009), becomes a woven grid that supports Murland’s exploration of her remembered past. Through a process of mark-making and erasure, the past is captured as a trace. Murland expresses her exploration of the fabric of maternal memory in the poem Mother Nurture:

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 has worked consistently to develop a personal painting methodology, which is able to effectively knit the materiality of paint with her own real experience. She writes: Integral to my process and methodology is the relationship between artist and materials, which translates the embodied experience of migration into visual, abstract documents that reference ‘surface’ as skin.

The use of abstraction has allowed Murland to explore complex and personal signs and symbols, emotions and connections. Her paintings often refer to the landscape, translating the fabric of the environment onto the ground skin of the canvas. Here, the artist is able to possess and reconfigure place as it relates to her personal identity. In some works, such as Journeys Past and Present (2008), Murland relates her methodology to her mother’s craft of knitting. 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.

Annemarie Murland’s paintings appear as independent objects, which are specifically arranged according to site. Murland treats the canvas support as an ‘archive’ for memory. In her 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. This dislocation in space elegantly echoes the sense of displacement that drives Murland’s work. The viewer is encouraged to acknowledge the physical space that is occupied by the body when navigating the exhibition.

Murland’s book of photographic images, The Dead End of Culture, could be described as a study of spatial relationships. These photographs record aspects of the artist’s return journey to Glasgow in 2007. The images included are specifically related to Murland’s navigation of her home town and are encoded with the resonance of her past experience. Carol L. Magee writes:

In looking at a photograph of an urban place, one reads a spatial story. Movement is central to understanding it, as people move through their city and engage its places, both in daily routines and in rarefied moments... a photograph reveals how people connect with, and belong to, their cities.

Annemarie Murland’s photographs, writing, drawing and painting combine to tell her part of a family story. These works are a legacy and a conversation, where past and present intermingle. Although Murland’s journey is a very personal and emotional one, she filters this experience through the material processes she applies. The resulting works are refreshingly light-handed, avoiding any excessive sentiment or self-indulgence.

Murland quietly insists on the essential importance of family, place and the attachments that bind us all. Her journey has been driven by her art practice, which has allowed her too process and resolve many of the issues that come with migration. Annemarie Murland is now comfortably established in Australia and describes herself as being ‘resolutely Scottish’. Perhaps we should conclude that home is not a place but a state of being.


Annemarie Murland is a Scottish artist and educator living in Newcastle, NSW, Australia
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