On this episode, Caren Sullivan talks to Artist and Curator Sharon Murphy in her studio in 2024. Curious about what is like inside an artist studio? Watch full episode here!

Sharon Murphy is a visual artist and curator based between Dublin and Paris whose practice encompasses photography, video and installation. Drawing on a background in theatre and informed by psychoanalysis and magic realism, her work provokes viewers to question what they are seeing, bringing their own histories and narratives to ‘complete’ the meaning of the image. Balancing the theoretical and the experiential (including that of the viewer), Murphy is especially drawn to the inherent binary nature of photography - the tensions of the medium between its real/indexical nature and its unreal/constructed nature. The photograph is simultaneously both record/truth and constructed/staged subject to multiple interpretations, perceptions and distortions by both maker and viewer.

Murphy investigates the boundaries between real and fictive spaces within the pictorial frame: concentrating on recurring motifs of theatre curtains; outdoor carousels; circus tents; performative sites; city parks; and empty stages. These scenes become the point of departure for a wider exploration of the tension between hidden and revealed, negative and positive, illusion and disillusion, the uncanny and the unremarkable.

Recent exhibitions: Photo Museum Ireland, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, GOMA, Waterford, Limerick City Gallery, Draíocht, National Gallery of Ireland, RHA, Golden Thread Gallery Belfast, Halftone, PhotoIreland, Loop Festival, Barcelona.

Current exhibitions 2025/26: Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast (solo), University Gallery UMAss Boston.

Murphy is a co-founding member of Shell/Ter Artist Collective (S/TAC). Her work is held is in private + public collections. She works between Dublin and Paris.

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