Anne Murray

My work is about vulnerability and the experience of a sensitive soul traversing a sharp-angled universe, with moments of bloodshed and healing, telling the story of survival.

I am closest to those who show their vulnerability, but often feel taken advantage of due to my sensitive nature, and willingness towards empathy. I create works as a record of these feelings and as a healing potion, a salve on the pain of existence and a contemplation of joy as ecstatic understanding and willful positivity in the face of vulnerability.

I studied in Paris, France, at Parsons School of Design and obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts. In New York City, I obtained a Master of Fine Arts and a Master of Science in Art History, from Pratt Institute, where I found a rough and contrasting environment much more difficult to navigate than Paris.

I later moved around the US and back to Europe, to Spain and later to China and back to Spain again. I felt a need to see and experience different cultures.

Twilight (Traces - 03/2023)

Emotion

Within is the sensation of a stone, a heaviness, hesitation, then a decision to plunge into unknown depths, a lake still and clear reflects nothing, absorbing all light, obscuring its own profundity. A nothingness, or rather the awareness of a barrier, something akin to concrete, porous, but solid, blocked so as not to feel the onion skin layers of each emotion unnamed, so therefore not yet fully born. Unlike feelings of the past, as if it/they exist in a multiverse, overlapping realities, each obscuring the other until the way becomes opaque like the path on a desert highway at night. I am aware of feeling, but it touches me only reluctantly, and passes, as a shark coming close, but changing course without consequence, fear and laughter together, an intense understanding of my own vulnerability. But no, not fear exactly, an undefinable rush, knowledge, inevitability, resolution, then nothing. The day at twilight, the sun in sorrow, a passing of a day into the shared sea of memory, slipping into it as the haze of light that passes through flesh, the sky alizarin, crimson lake, evaporates slightly, the color eliminating itself, as the mark of breath on a window pane. A knowledge of something beyond feeling, a wisdom perhaps, or a filter of what is real and what is only an impression of chemical reactions in the body. No, not sorrow, a sun descending into its womb, a space of time, a passing from a third dimension into two, emotions compress into intensity, density, propensity towards what, I am not sure, the way builds its own walls as it moves, the road is not a path to travel, but rather, wall upon wall, once removed another appears.

The works I created during the Circle Pro Art online residency, are in essence the manifestation of this joy, a memory of a friend who was lost and a voyage perhaps inside the body in search of the soul emanating as a glowing light somewhere inside of all living and inanimate things in our universe. I am fascinated by the light that travels so far from a star, even after it has died; perhaps here, I capture the light of the star within my friend, lost now to us on this earthly path, but evaporating into the sky and beyond. Twilight, the space between night and day, or perhaps between different lights, the light from the sun, and the eternal light of the energy that passes through us into an ongoing and expanding universe.

Twilight

(Twilight - poem)

Twi

a sound eclipsed by night

a light above as below

continuum and destiny

deserted by desire.

Whatever would you have been if I had not

cast an eye?

Witness to the netherland

I think of you at twilight,

twixt night and day