Text | James William Murray

2024
Material As Memory, Touch As Dialog – A Conversation With Artist James William Murray
Aesence

Aesence: Hey James! It’s a pleasure to talk to you about your work today! Please tell us, how would you describe your art to someone who has never seen it?

James William Murray: Hello Sarah, thank you for your thoughtful questions. My work involves formal and conceptual gestures spanning painting, sculpture, and photography. I tend to work in series and draw from a ‘family’ of materials that are applied in various combinations, including beeswax, graphite, linen, and different types of timber, as well as metals such as steel, copper, brass, and silver. The work reflects upon the sensuality and fragility of the body through the materiality of artistic medium. I often use my own body as a kind of template or formal point of reference, simply because it is the thing that is most readily available, and therefore feels like a logical starting point. The memento mori and the theological concept of the relic are also recurring points of reference.

A: In recent years, your artistic expression has continuously evolved, but your reduced way of expression remains a consistent thread in your work. What particularly attracts you to minimalist aesthetics?

JWM: I’m interested in the overlap between minimalist and classical aesthetics in terms of their shared formal concerns with harmony, proportion, restraint, and clarity. I apply these principles to my work with both abstract and figurative forms, which I don’t see as a binary or opposing force, but part of a continuum.

A: Your work is characterized by touches, markings, tactility, and materiality. How does this physical aspect influence your personal relationship with your artworks?

JWM: I’m less attached to individual pieces than to the overall process of making art, which has an accumulative effect. Touch is a reciprocal exchange — everything we touch touches us back. Sometimes those interactions leave physical marks; other times, they create internal, psychological impressions. Either way, the work marks me as much as I mark it.

A: You spent a significant part of your childhood near a convent. How did this time shape your perspective on spirituality and art?

JWM: Throughout my formative childhood years, I lived in a house next to The Priory of Our Lady in West Sussex, where my mother worked caring for the Sister nuns. From the vantage point of adulthood, I recognize what a significant impact that environment had on my sense of being and belonging as a child.There are certain parallels between devotional practices and the way of life I witnessed at The Priory, and the way I approach art making as a life-long vocation. I would also add that the reverence for touch and materiality in sacred rituals resonates with my thinking around my work and I continue to draw from Catholic symbolism and iconography, both visually and conceptually.

A: Which part of your creative process do you enjoy the most, and why?

JWM: The fleeting moments when I feel an intense connection between my materials and body are special, but rare. And so, I find the most satisfaction in the quiet, routine rhythm of my studio practice. Recently, I moved to Woodingdean, a village near Brighton on the South East Coast of England, where I’ve built a work space and viewing room next to my house.

A deck runs above part of the building, and on dry days I enjoy working outdoors, immersed in the surrounding chalk Downland. This is a stark contrast to my former city centre studio, which looked out onto a very busy traffic intersection. I love working here — it feels like a natural merging of my domestic and working life.

A: Your monochrome graphite paintings create intriguing complex textures that reflect and distort light. Can you tell us more about how you create these works and how you embrace the distinct quality of this material?

JWM: My graphite paintings are an ongoing series I’ve been making since 2016. The process involves layering liquid beeswax and graphite powder onto timber, canvas, and linen surfaces, burnishing by hand between each layer. This builds depth and reflectivity in the graphite, intensifying the visual texture of the wood grain or fabric weave beneath.

Graphite is a pure form of carbon with an elemental link to diamond, yet it is soft and malleable. Its unique quality of absorbing and reflecting light gives the surfaces a shifting presence, which is affected by the environment around it, so I consider it an active, spatial material. It is also one of the earliest materials humans and our ancient ancestors used to make marks, and I believe that this deep-seated connection to the material can still be felt.

A: Art is always a dialog between the artist and the viewer. What kind of dialog do you wish to start?

JWM: Work focused on the visual representation of touch holds significant potential as a dialogical starting point because it is so central to the human experience. However, I’m not interested in dictating the nature of this dialogue. Once the work has left my studio what happens between it and the viewer is out of my hands.

A: What are you currently working on, and what are your plans for the future? Are there any subjects that you would like to explore further?

JWM: I’m currently working on a series of works on paper made with copper particles suspended in oil. I use the material to capture fleeting impressions of touch in motion. These will be my focus throughout the winter as I make my graphite paintings outdoors during the warmer months.

2023
James William Murray Interviews Cecilia Vissers

Saturation Point

Cecilia Vissers and I both explore distinct formal problems with certain similarities. For the past 30 years, Cecilia has been working with the central motif of the curve, which she explores principally through hot-rolled steel and aluminium wall-mounted objects and floor pieces. My own practice is centred on a 1:2 cruciform – a problem that emerged through a series of drawings I made during a residency in Marfa, Texas USA, in the summer of 2022.

I first encountered Cecilia’s work at inde/jacobs gallery in Marfa, which has represented her for almost ten years. After making contact via social media, I visited Cecilia at her home and studio in Sint-Oedenrode in The Netherlands exactly one year later. Cecilia and her husband Hans welcomed me into their home and fed me a delicious vegetarian meal. Over the day and evening we spent together, Cecilia and I discussed several overlapping concerns and experiences in our lives as artists. We set out to consolidate some of these overlaps in this interview.

Cecilia and I meeting at this juncture in our careers feels significant. It marks the inception of a promising connection. Cecilia, having dedicated 30 years to exploring the curve, is now entering a pivotal phase we might call the 'third chapter' of her career. Meanwhile, I'm embarking on a new body of work centred on the cruciform, a trajectory I foresee continuing throughout my career. We both share a sense of contentment that our paths intersected at this point in time. I eagerly anticipate our further discussions, particularly during her upcoming presentation at Saturation Point on 24 September 2023.

James William Murray: I understand that the pieces showcased at Saturation Point belong to an ongoing project entitled ‘The Ocean Path’, which you initially exhibited at Scott Miller Projects in Birmingham, Alabama, USA, earlier this year. Could you please walk me through the pieces you are presenting in this exhibition and explain how they connect to the broader body of work?

Cecilia Vissers: People who know my work will immediately notice the expansion of my colour palette with purple, the colour of magic and power. I’ll show a new series of works entitled ‘Voe’. Each aluminium sculpture consists of two parts; the space between the two parts is very important. In theory, one could think away the sculpture’s tangible parts (the aluminium) and consider the space between them the actual sculpture. This is an interplay between the positive and negative space, the visible and invisible – what one feels and what one sees. My black/white photo prints of the wild landscapes and coastlines of the Shetland islands will be shown next to my aluminium sculptures. Here you see many coastal landscapes that are intersected by so-called voes or fjords. These photographs form the basis for my minimalist sculptures, it’s my aim to ‘link’ the abstract with the world around us. My multi-faceted project, entitled ‘The Ocean Path’, started in November 2022 with a working period on the Shetland Islands, a sub-arctic archipelago lying between Orkney, the Faroe Islands, and Norway. The exhibition at SP is the second exhibition in a series of four exhibitions. The third and fourth exhibitions will take place at Icoon Museum Hoek van Holland and the culture factory Noordkade in the city of Veghel (NL).

JWM: Could you please elaborate on your process, focusing on materials and the industrial techniques you employ? Additionally, can you discuss the collaborative relationships you have developed with craftspeople in relation to these processes?

CV: In my sculptures I look for strong and clear forms (hard-edge) with minimal features. Metal is the one perfect material for my sculptures because of its thickness, weight, and sharp edges. Working in such a hard material requires a well-thought-out plan; most interventions in a plate of steel or aluminium are irreversible so I want to make sure that the result meets my expectations. This characteristic of metal is consistent with my belief that each action has its effect, no matter how small the intervention is. The starting point of my work is a design in cardboard; after a 30-year career I have piles of designs in my studio. The next step is the execution of my works in steel or aluminium. This process is technically very complex; I deliver my models and digital files to three specialised metal companies. The aluminium works are milled using a 3D-milling technique in a closed cabin. The industrial colouring of aluminium usually requires more attention from a company, and this must fit into the production process. I do many material and colour proofs before I decide what thickness, surface treatment and shade of colour I choose for a particular design. The collaboration with specialised craftspeople in the industries is a very important part of my work. I have been working for 25 years with the same water-cutting company, where I can also store my material. These contacts are very important in my practice. Besides, it's inspiring to visit companies and learn what technical processes they use to produce metal objects in different forms, colours, and alloys.

JWM: While our work strictly adheres to non-representational forms, neither of us denies the presence of semantic content. How do you perceive the relationship between spirituality, nature, and abstraction within your work, and how do these elements shape its meaning?

CV: The exclusion of the unnecessary makes it possible to focus on the essential. Many studio visits lead to interesting, in-depth conversations about the essence of life. To me art and life are inseparable, there is a rise and fall, just like the waves in the ocean, a continuous movement. This brings me to the relationship of nature in my work. Although my metal sculptures appear to be abstract, each piece invokes my own landscape experience. I have a fascination for remote and wild places like Achill Island (IRL) and more recently the Shetland Islands. My travel to the northernmost cliffs of the Shetland Islands inspired me to start my project ‘The Ocean Path’. My works are characterised by a rectangular shape with incisions, or internal 'curves’. The addition of the 'external' curves or ‘waves’ is a totally new development in my work. It seems like a small step, but to me it feels like a revolution. These small subtle shifts are important and bring me closer to the essence of life. A small shift can be enough to bring about a significant change. These coastal landscapes reveal a fundamental truth. The power and serenity of nature bring me closer to the essence of life.

JWM: We both work with central formal ‘problems’; I explore a 1:2 cruciform motif, which is relatively new to me, but you have been working with the curve for the past 30 years. I am curious to hear what you have learned from the experience of working with this central form for so long...

CV: The ‘curve’ is a lifelong challenge to me, a positive certainty in my life. There are infinite variations in this theme, most of them just small changes that always take me a step further in my never-ending investigation. The road is long and inspiring. My first curve was a hand-cut curve in a rough strip of steel (1999); at that time I had no idea this would be the central theme in my work. Curve No.1 is still on my workbench, it’s my prototype. Sometimes people ask if it’s for sale, the answer is “I don’t sell my soul, not even for a million euros”. The curve is a small intervention in the metal plate, it changes the appearance of the strict geometric rectangle. The curve adds some lightness. Just a small change can affect the whole.

2020

The Drawing Stone
Bryony Bodimeade

As two abrasive surfaces rub together, becoming particles and heat, they get smoother. Closing the creviced spaces between them their jagged edges disperse, puffing away into the air, falling as sediment. They change together and give to each other a grain. To be able to perceive the grain, the traces of exchange and disintegration, a closeness is needed again. So closely pored over, so thoroughly and continually marked, material appearance collapses into noise and an attentive sensitivity to this noise overtakes observational comprehension, nurturing an alertness to the relationships between presences.

There is something contained in this body of James’ work, between the delicate material instability and the committed act, which causes me to catch at the exchange of touch and want to stay closely by it. Or should it be the committed materiality and the delicate act? either way it’s a reciprocal act of rubbing, where the one which rubs is also rubbed by, leaving both parties coated and burnished, both grimy and glossy. This is the effect. A glossy grime. A perfect grimey gloss. A crystalline layer of carbon atoms, in some lights a dull, humble grey - but this is graphite, an elemental sibling of diamond, highly conductive and resistant. A conduit for power to rush through. If you run a high electric current through a graphite pencil it combusts, charring the wood yet leaving the graphite rod unchanged. If a certain voltage were to be sent through one of these carbon veneers would it spark, throb with a hot glow, flash bright white with a bang, cause the cotton or linen threads to curl smouldering away? Or singe its smooth wooden host but then, once the volts had died down again, appear from the outside as though nothing had happened – its sheen and patina as ever: fine, morose, glittering/denying that it did so?

Here, graphite, ‘the writing stone’, the erasable trace of the pencil – propositional and communicative - becomes an unbroken coat of mineral. In service of neither word nor mark the graphite as matter ground into a surface still however draws to its object a sense of proposition and can still be legible maybe as a letter. As though the graphite is here a mode of transmitting a gesture or feeling to others - to named recipients. I want to say it still makes a love letter.

As I think about the names given to these pieces – Samuel, Daniel, Joseph, Jacob – who are presences in the network of the pieces' relations, I think about form-name-likeness: of what it is for something to be like something else, to name in likeness. Graphite archaically was called plumbago, meaning to resemble (agere) lead (plumbum). This slippage of appearance and likeness led too to the graphite in pencils being known as pencil lead, and to the name of the plumbago flower – with petals of a cloudy yet bright grey-blue, who’s sap leaves a lead-coloured stain on skin, and which was believed by Pliny the Elder, the first person recorded to use the name, to provide a cure for lead poisoning. There’s a soft style, a pillowy absorption of atmosphere, not a colour but the way that a colour is. A person, a petal, a metal, a mineral.

A collection of qualities, of glosses and grimes, goes like, like, like: like a sun-starved under-leaf, like moisture on a dark rock in a clouded light, like squinting in the aching brightness of a smog, like a sequin putting gold sky in the gravelly dirt, like pointing to your face reflected in your knee in the bath. (A photograph of a plumbago flower inverted becomes what appears to be an image of a flower made of brass. Its odd tone and texture of cool gold-yellow an inversion of the warm blue-grey. This discovery is arbitrary, whimsical, serendipitous. Uncertainly, I’ll keep it in.)

When the surface of the objects – the wood stretcher-bars, woven canvasses, flesh fingers – become coated in graphite, become with sheen, they become in a number of ways photographic, joining an interaction back and forth between space and light, developing and fixing. As they become light reflective objects, to be photographed, they seem too to have become their silvery selves in black-and-white prints. As they are coated in a shimmery membrane, sensitive and exposed, it is as though the mineral has enabled them to draw with light.

In some pieces, a brass shim, less than half a millimetre thick, has been wrapped over timber – folded at the edges and corners like canvas over a stretcher - and hammered in different ways, causing the reflection to distort. It is fragile and thin, like a layer of skin. In others, brass is applied as a smooth panel. Like the graphite but differently it is rubbed and rubbed, in a struggle against its proclivity to smear, to record every touch, until it shines and reflects, until finger touches twin finger. By mirroring it widens space, connecting what it is with where it is and who it is with, and it makes these connections in a golden light which saturates them in an understanding of the workings of desire. In a desirous narrative of glow and reflection, touch and trace, permeation and exchange.

There’s a sense, in this body of work, of the artist having found in the subtle changeability and environmental sensitivity of the graphite and brass a way for things to be which has the right feel. A way for things to be which is affected by conditions and space and the presence of others. Which takes on, extends, and reflects. As if these are articulated states of being-in-relation. Networks of relationships are established and at times these emerges as dualities, where one thing becomes understood in relation to a particular other thing: brass and graphite, material and body, self and other. But rather than these being portrayed as distinct binaries an attentiveness to interrelation, touching, process and cross pollination creates an attunement instead to intimate details of the differences within, of the overlaps, and of the becoming of each other.

In places the brass and graphite physically touch one another. In these small but intense interactions - in the soft glow of gold in the grey-sheened weave, as in the calling out to another’s name, as in the methods of joining, as in the schemes of connecting - there is something like a critical intimacy, which ripples the unbroken surfaces of the objects with subjectivities, which considers the ways that attachments are created to and between ideas and things and people.

2015

An Impossible Task: on James William Murray's Beheld
Seán Padraic Birnie

In the Natural History, Pliny locates the origins of art, of the graphic and plastic arts, in the trauma of romantic loss. As a way of staving off a future loss and as a form of compensation once it has passed. The question of contact and of touching plays a determinate part in proceedings: the present lover directly casts his shadow; the young woman directly traces his shadow; her father fashions his sculpture directly from the trace. A certain connection threads through each medial layer. So art begins with the shadow of its subject, its ghost or shade, a derivative effect. Something primary and vital is lost; the work of art exists in a condition of secondarity, surrogacy, derivation. The myth establishes the question of medium, too, of the limitations that enable and disable in unequal measure: sculpture, which takes drawing as its model; and how the shift into three dimensions from the original tracing becomes a more powerful invocation of presence. In this sculpture fulfills a promise that drawing makes but cannot honour. It becomes something you can touch. It becomes something you can hold, and thereby compensates, or for a time seems to compensate, for the inadequacy of the two-dimensional image. It replaces the shadow of the man with the shadow of the sculpture. The sculpture, as the fulfillment of this process, as a tactile thing occupying space in the world, becomes a surrogate for the lover and the lost sensuality of love.

But in its fulfillment of that promise it risks a deeper betrayal: the truest likeness becomes the greatest travesty. Instead of summoning that presence, it casts the absence into sharp relief. What aspired to compensate becomes a taunt. The likeness simulates presence, but in the very efficacy of its simulation throws a harsh light on the facts of distance and future-loss. Photography, in which the automatic apparatus secures a form of homological likeness unparalleled in the other depictive arts, exacerbates this logic. Every photograph is this catastrophe, as Barthes says of the picture of Lewis Payne, shortly before his execution. For the Hungarian photographer Brassaï “...the question is always to find that sole translation that will be valid in another language... for all literal translation is treason.” The medium’s fidelity to surfaces enables the illusion that one might enter the picture, that the image plane hoards depth, forever just out of reach. The desires photography sets in motion (and the very desire which set photography into motion) animate the belief in that illusion (and we know it is an illusion, of course, we are not naive: nevertheless, the precision secures our belief, in spite of that knowledge), which works only at a certain distance: nose against print or screen, the image breaks up, becomes grain or noise. Becomes a hard surface. What at first seems to put you into touch becomes at last a barrier.

In photographs and partial sculptures, Beheld explores these barriers. One might go further and say that the essence of the work does not reside in the individual pieces, but in their interrelationships, and in the primary relationship Beheld supplants, that of lover and the beloved, artist and subject. The work finds its starting point and aesthetic logic in the myth of the Corinthian maid. Tease out the meanings that its title set in play: to hold and to touch, most obviously. To possess and be possessed; the eye of the beholder (and the failure of photography’s optical regime), a later addition in English to the Germanic compound. In relation to its combination of different media, the way a medium holds, or tries to hold, its subject. The term always contains this sense of potential loss: one only need hold on to something that can be taken away. Hold still – like a sculpture – for a photograph. Hold back. Contain, like a frame, or like a medium. That containment necessarily fails, and it is this failure that seems to me to be the key to the way that Beheld works. The subject – any subject – will always exceed its form: the translation of which Brassaï speaks is always an abstraction, a reduction. There is no lossless medium. Condemned to an impossible task, the problem becomes one of doing justice to the subject, to the subject’s overflowing excess: in the interstices between its components – digital photographs on tracing paper; a sculpture in marble dust; stills from an unshown video recording the attempt to draw a perfect circle – that excess returns in spectral from: a product of spatial relationships, of incomplete processes, unfinished things. That form does not become visible or tangible, and in this way it eludes the violence of reduction. Instead it hovers in the gaps.

The likeness in marble dust is from a direct mold of the subject’s face (Andre Bazin likens photographs to a death mask, molded from that face). It’s a temporary sculpture, reformed for every showing. The delicacy of the thing solicits the desire to touch, but of course to touch it would be to destroy the likeness, would dislodge its precarious shape. Like a reflection in water – touch the surface and the splash disrupts the image. In a reversal of the shift, in the Corinthian Maid myth, from the graphic image to the plastic form, the sculpture in its turn becomes the subject of a photograph, fixing that precarity in the stillness of the picture. It is a photograph of the sculpture, but not of this sculpture, the one here on the floor, but an earlier point in the series of temporary sculptures made for each showing of the work. Possibly the original sculpture, though what status accrues to an original is rather thrown into question. But in the studio now the two works, sculpture and photograph, photograph of an earlier form of the present sculpture, vie for primacy in a struggle without resolution. Perhaps that irresolution in itself is the point: this skein of mediations, from body to shadow to tracing to cast to sculpture – when the lover departs, only this tangle of shadows and shadows of shadows remains.