Paula Murray
Adrift, wall sculpture of bound porcelain scrolls, 122 x 113 x 10 cm, 2021
Created for the juried Treinnale en métiers d;art 2021 L'éloge du fil ( In Praise of the Thread ) and received the Prix d’excellence from le Conseil des métiers d’art du Québec. The exhibition toured three Quebec public galleries: Centre d’art de La Sarre; Espace Pierre-Debain, Gatineau; Centre Materia, Québec City as well as being exhibited at the salon des métiers d'arts in Montreal.
Artist Statement
"I have been making scrolls and working on ideas associated with sources of knowledge.
In Mesopotamia, trade records were written in clay and then fired so the information could not be altered. Nowadays, we associate scrolling with a way of moving through large amounts of information on a screen. Our challenge is to separate fact from fiction, truth from spin. Scrolls have recorded spiritual texts that have influenced the moral fabric of civilization for millennia. With the explosion of scientific knowledge since the Enlightenment, over time many in our society have lost confidence in spiritual institutions and have moved away from these sources of guidance.
Lines emerge on each scroll I make, and once fired in the kiln, they cannot be manipulated. They evoke a language that needs decoding. The thread that binds cannot hold the circle. I see a moral urgency in our time calling us to examine the connection between two fundamental sources of knowledge: scientific and spiritual."