Ro Murray

29 December - 01 February      #Fuelled 1 & 2

Link to artist's website

Ro Murray spent 30 years as an architect. She designed extensions to people’s homes. Then, because of an accident – or was it an epiphany? She threw it in for art, and studied at The National Art School from 2007 to 2010.

In conversation, Ro described these works as wall weavings. They are woven from the material of industrial doors but they could be made of anything. Ro’s interest is not in becoming the master of any particular idiom. She prefers pragmatic choices when realising her vision and here she has done that with insight. The material and the images she has made appear inseparable.

Their inception occurred in a lecture given by Lyn Cook on the work of Anni Albers who began as Anni Fleischmann studying at the Bauhaus, the epicentre of European modernism. She became Albers by marrying a lecturer there, Josef Albers. When the Bauhaus closed in 1933 they moved to the USA where together they helped invent the mid-20th century modernism of the New York School, and it’s credo of flatness. This is the idea that the surface of a painting is not an illusion; it is the fact that it is a 2 dimensional surface interrupted by paint. 

Ro’s credentials are impeccable. Her colour choice obliterates any sense of illusion and connects her to the constructivist origin of the Bauhaus. So why then do her images look like calligraphic signs that might be Chinese, or Korean or Japanese? Is that in her eye or in our mind?

People often enjoy seeing the street reflected in SLOT exhibits. With tEasterhis exhibit I can’t help seeing SLOT reflected in the window of the Vietnamese restaurant opposite. It sits comfortably there provoking the idea that a painting is simultaneously intimate and universal, an allusion and a fact. Is that an accident or is it a revelation?  

  - Tony Twigg