Michael Murphy

My practice is rooted in the use of traditional tooling to produce modern and innovative forms in both furniture and sculpture.

Working with wood I create sculptural vessels rich in texture.

My current body of work centres around the death of the Ash tree. We watch as our hedgerow is forever transformed, a piece of nature soon to be confined to memory. My work aims to use these Ash trees and immortalise them in sculpture, exploring the limits of how thin I can turn them, having them drift into a liminal space between existence and non-existence which is the state of their species. These works have a sense of ritual about them, I like to think of myself as exhuming the tree, gathering up its limbs and allowing them to be reborn as tactile objects, some I bleach alabaster white like bone, others I scorch to cremate them.