Jemima Murphy: Finding June

Victoria Miro Projects is delighted to launch an online presentation by London-based artist Jemima Murphy. This is the sixth project in an ongoing series of presentations by invited international artists on Vortic.

Identifying her works as reimagined landscapes, Jemima Murphy draws on the physicality of paint in order to examine and portray her own emotional experience. Reflecting the sublime and its qualities within the natural world, each painting is an abstracted realm of colour and space.

Colour is used as a vocabulary within Murphy’s paintings. She describes colour as ‘an energy that’s similar to an adrenaline rush’. Contrasting vibrant and dark hues evoke fleeting moments of revelation in works such as Addictive Blooms (all works 2024), whilst in Bruised Hour the colour blue represents vulnerability and healing. Other paintings, including the vertical diptych June Unbound, employ colour to create a sense of distance and space.

For Murphy, the act of painting is a personal activity. During intense bursts of energy, she works instinctively and often across multiple canvases at once, each work built up in a series of layers. Immediacy and movement are fundamental to her practice. Inquiring into the nature of paint itself, her colours are mixed both on palettes and directly on her canvases. She employs myriad techniques in which the medium is poured and dripped in washes as well as applied in urgent, rhythmic strokes.

Fluctuating between thick, saturated colour and lighter areas, her works explore opposites. Murphy balances ideas of abundance and scarcity, pain and happiness, the expected and unexpected. Using these universal binaries, each canvas is transformed into an enigmatic landscape in which spontaneity and order are held in a natural equilibrium.