Aileen Murphy: Crackers for Lorelei

26 Feb-5 Apr 2025

PV 26 Feb 2025, 6-8pm

Overview

We live on slow, inexorable moving footpaths, thousands of metres beneath our feet. 
(Michel Serres, The Five Senses)

A group of Surrealists sit around a table and play a game: write or draw something, obscure it by folding the piece of paper, then pass it to the next person to do the same. Repeat. End by opening up the paper to improbable results. They call the game Exquisite Corpse, a phrase the game itself throws up: le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau, the exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.
(André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism)

By such methods a car can grow legs (Triple Midnight), its wheels turn blue and liquid like spray paint. Fold an image on a piece of paper and suddenly one geometric plane turns to two, three, four, five ... Forget what they taught in school of one-point perspective, the world is of infinite creases and folds.

In Grotto a sea-green flood of water is both background and foreground. A suggestion of sun rises and sets. Two yellowish legs split out from a separate place altogether (one foot hinged inward, doll-like). A human figure that figures its opposite: the doll, automaton, waxwork – shell without body or life.

In The mathematics of shoe boxes, too, the body comes in doll-parts, three laughing heads more object than subject, more background than foreground. Nestled among pink folds, their patches of painterly skin-hues do more to flatten than to bring them to life.

something there somewhere outside
the head
(Samuel Beckett, ‘Something There’)

Yet, to quote Gertrude Stein, there is no there there. Try opening the door in Pocket and it’ll collapse into folds of paper. No inside or outside, nowhere to go. 
(Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography)

A fold is always folded within a fold, like a cavern in a cavern. The unit of matter, the smallest element of the labyrinth, is the fold, not the point.
(Gilles Deleuze, The Fold)

So forget vanishing points, a stable grid laying it all out. Instead find portals, doorways. À la sauce Robert opens up into separate containers of space – look to the left tree stump, a little trapdoor of yellow. A minute mark comes to rupture all else. Balloon, collapse, flood. A kind of sea-sickness.

The Lorelei rock on the Rhine after which the Siren is named, luring boats to destruction.

Stone, stone, ferry me down there.
(Sylvia Plath, 'Lorelei')

Aileen Murphy (b. 1984) lives and works in Berlin. She graduated from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin (2007) and then studied under Amy Sillman and Monika Baer at Städelschule Frankfurt, graduating in 2018. Recent solo shows include Deborah Schamoni, Munich (2022); Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin (2022); Amanda Wilkinson, London, UK (2020) and Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin (2019). Her work is in public collections such as Zuzeum Art Centre, Latvia, Xiao Hui Wang Museum of Contemporary Art, China, and the Arts Council of Ireland 

This exhibition is supported with a grant from Culture Ireland.