HANNAH MURRAY ENTROPICANA

Foreword

It is a pleasure to present Hannah Murray’s first major solo exhibition, Entropicana, in Perc Tucker Regional Gallery’s 40th year. We in the Townsville City Galleries team remain committed to our local artists and to helping deliver exhibitions and realise ambitions of our artists, helping wherever we can to usher in the next generation of practitioners. Hailing from the Burdekin and a long-time resident of Townsville, Murray has been exhibiting her work in galleries and selling her designs at maker markets and pop ups with increasing frequency over the last few years, and has been establishing herself as an artist to watch. Recent exhibitions at Umbrella Studio and Murky Waters (an artist-run studio and gallery Murray co-founded) have been increasing in sophistication and nuance. Murray has recently relocated to Cairns, an ideal access point for her visual and thematic interests.

Murray’s work belongs to a certain school of artists whose North Queensland experiences leave a clear and present impression upon the artist’s work, often in surprising ways. Artists such as John Coburn, Roland Nancarrow, Anneke Silver, Ian Smith, Sylvia Ditchburn, Ray Crooke and Robert Preston have all been directly influenced by the unique forms, colours and light of the tropics, and have explored these aspects in various ways. Murray’s fascination with plant life in particular conjures Nancarrow and Coburn’s forms, and her sense of colour, at once vivid and subtle, seems to both reflect and cut light, much like the diverse biological forms she draws, paints and collages.

Right from the outset, Hannah Murray’s Entropicana confronts us with a loaded proposition; death and decay always follow the flourishing of life, just as the flourishing of life follows death and decay. The tropical regions contain and support most life on Earth, both above and below water, and it is through this mass of life that vast, vital and expansive chains of energy extend beyond our region through migration and responses to fire, flood and drought, expanding and contracting.

Entropy is commonly misunderstood as a scientific term for energy death, but this is not quite correct. Entropy most often refers particularly to the law of conservation of energy, wherein the total energy of an isolated system remains constant, and the second law of thermodynamics, wherein it is predicted that energy cannot be created or destroyed in an isolated system, but rather continues to be transformed or adapted through complex processes. The full process of life (including death and subsequent decay) supports both of these scientific laws, despite their differences. This may all seem a little abstract, but to put it into context, the Earth, moon and sun could be considered a closed system, and by that rationale, the increasing rate and intensity of natural disasters could therefore be considered the signs of entropy. So, rather than energy death, it could be argued that entropy (like the process triggered with death) is actually energy transformation.

I find myself drawn to Murray’s interest in the Japanese concept of Ukiyo. The term alludes to two separate but interlinked ideas. The first being the Buddhist use of the word, which connotes the earthly plane which Buddhists seek escape through transcendence and enlightenment. The term is also used ironically to imply the idea of sorrowful or fleeting pleasures; in other words, pleasures of the flesh. The other, Ukiyo-e, is a popular printmaking tradition that depicts such scenes, whereas Murray’s approach remains deeply rooted in both conceptual sides of Ukiyo. Life follows death follows life follows death.

When transposing the gravity of these ideas against the Tropicana and Exotica Murray is so often drawn to, the result is a delicious fusion of dark and light, the warm, the tropical light cut by the deep green and blue shadows it creates. These works are indicative of an aspect of life that is at once obvious and mysterious to us. Life and death are mysterious, and yet form the very framework through which we experience the world, yardsticks by which to measure life’s great joys and sorrows.

Dr Jonathan McBurnie Creative Director, Townsville City Galleries