RO MURRAY

Every Time the Sun Comes Up

Every Time the Sun Comes Up[i] is the wistful song playing in the background while artist Ro Murray works alone and to a new rhythm in her studio. For many, this recent lockdown has been a time defined by isolation and yearning. The chorus every time the sun comes up, I’m in trouble references repetition, physical cycles and what it is to feel blue, yet is tinted with warmth and the suggestion of renewal.

The linoleum-printed series made during this period, Riff in Prussian Blue, sees a marked shift in colour. Murray’s past signature palette of red and black on white has relaxed and given way to yellows and blues, woven through with violets and greens. Visually it seems as if the new hues have been laid over and across the old familiar order - the inks transforming, blending and softening. These are colours chosen for their calming and healing associations. Rather than a dominant symbol, there are instead layers, nuance and translucency and with the resulting harmonies, an evocation of vulnerability and somehow, liberation. This is balanced by the rigour of her method; the discipline of restricting forms to only horizontal and vertical elements and with just one colour printed per day, over multiple sheets of paper. The minimal means lends poignancy to the message, for even when the sun comes up, I’m in trouble.

Every Time the Sun Comes Up, I see double. The exhibition at AIRspace is an occasion to translate the printed works into a site-specific weaving installation. Relinquishing the crisp negative space of white paper for the gallery hollow of white-painted brick, is to adapt the hard edged certainty of colour and form to a more fallible space echoing with previous uses and occupants. Much is uncertain, and will depend on material aspects that cannot be completely controlled. This enables the formal spatial relationships of the work to be read as traversing into the uncertain terrain of human ones. It is often said, but no less true, how an eloquent and simple phrasing can remain, the song stuck in your head, long after the concert fades.

Lisa Pang (Lisa Sharp)

June 2020

[i] Sharon Van Etten, Every Time the Sun Comes Up (2014), Track 11 on Are We There, New York: Jagjaguwar / Ba Da Bing Records.