Kudos acknowledges and pays respect to the Gadigal and Bidjigal people of the Eora nation. They are the traditional custodians of the land Kudos operates on. We create, design, share, and exchange our work and knowledge on this important meeting place. We pay our respects to elders past and present and extend that respect to any First Nations people who engage with Kudos. This is and always will be Aboriginal land.
| Abby Murray is an American-Australian artist living and working on Gadigal and Gurangai land in Sydney, Australia. Through a multi-disciplinary approach to visual storytelling, Murray creates iterative installations that expand on notions of painting, performance, and hobby craft. Sloppily and purposefully, her material assemblages are painted, ripped apart, dyed, bleached, and over-layered as sites of embodied histories, often held together with threads, clamps and armatures that hold personal and prosthetic memories. Her art objects visualise the past as a site open for negotiation rather than preservation. In particular, Murray’s cumulative practice re-constitutes remnants of her own making alongside anachronistic materials to illuminate the unrealised potential of feminist histories, which includes traces of her own history as well as the fragmented, forgotten and lost moments that didn’t make it into history books. Murray has a BFA (fashion design) from Columbia College Chicago and a BFA (honours) from UNSW Art & Design, where she is also undertaking a Master of Fine Arts by Research. www.abbymurray.art @abbymariemurray |
| Something is Happening(s) Something is Happening(s) is anchored in the rediscovery of the lost archives of my late maternal grandmother, Arletta Abbey, an early feminist artist, single mother and MFA student of the 1960s who prematurely died in 1967. Following alongside my MFA research in feminist and queer storytelling, a temporaralise, spatialise and iterate my own work to respond to and illuminate my own past failures, and those of my feminist ancestry, to visualise a non-linear form of historical storytelling, where embodying and exemplifying the idea that the past can, and does, rupture the present shows up in a self-referential practice. Something is Happening(s) takes its title from the 'happenings' of the 1960s that interrupted traditional gallery settings in this work I borrow the haptic interruptions to open up a cross-temporal relationship with my grandmother, that gets visualised into theatre-like objects such as drapery, props and over-sized body parts. Ultimately asking: if the past is happening in the present, can we prioritise feeling and doing rather than just understanding? |