Michael Murphy

Michael Murphy is a cabinet-maker, woodturner and sculptor based in Wicklow Town. His ongoing current ventures include Mammals+ and Non Violent Cutlery. His work aims to create modern artefacts that possess a unique sense of ritual and embodied time.

He works collaboratively with wet green wood. In this way, the material retains a sense of autonomy throughout the making process, responding to his initial suggestion of form as it dries, then twisting and warping through a reciprocal dialogue between maker and material. The surfaces of his final forms are heavily textured, carved by hand with a gouge. They invite people to hold the work, to reach out to touch it, to see with their hands and allow the thousands of facets and ridges that adorn its surfaces to speak to the viewer directly and draw connections between people and their natural environment. His current interests focus on a reimagining of what Irish material culture might look like were it not for the interruption of colonialism. What rituals would have persisted and evolved? What would our modern artefacts look like? And what would our natural world – particularly our forests and our stewardship of them – be?

Michael Murphy applied for a Golden Fleece Award to undertake a new project celebrating and waking an endangered native Irish species – the Ash tree – as the disease which will obliterate it takes hold and we witness its gradual disappearance from our hedgerows. Funding would cover the cost of materials and the purchase of a new lathe which would allow him to scale up his work, as well as paying him for his time.