A recent Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) graduate, Grace Murphy is an emerging artist working in the traditional medium of oil on wood panels.
Influenced by her childhood spent growing up on a farm and her recent work within the pet industries, Grace harbours a fascination for the relationship between humans and animals. Evolving from portraiture conveying figurative sculptures rather than human subjects, her work began to assume a tangible sense of detachment, that rests upon paintings of people that never existed in real life. This rupture between the real and the fictional eventually led Grace to the realm of AI where a whole prompt-driven world has begun to offer up beguiling and engrossing inspiration for her work.
For her recent VCA graduate exhibition in 2023, Grace presented a unique perspective on human/animal life through a series of ornamental depictions of out-of-place animals. The subjects exist in an artificially constructed moment, symbolising numerous complexities in human/animal relationships such as domestication, personification and self-projections to begin to touch on themes of evolutionary deviations, human interference with breeding and the value of animals.
In an age of ever-advancing technology, Grace's work utilises the digital to produce paintings that touch on the heart of humanity. The outcomes are striking and thought-provoking images that land differently for each and every viewer.