Kendal Murray’s Tiny Worlds

Upcoming, Homecoming, 2021, mixed media assemblage, Kendal Murray

By Chance, At First Glance, 2016, mixed media assemblage, Kendal Murray

 

We’re sort of obsessed with artists who work with miniatures, ever since we first spied Tatsuya Tanaka’s quirky photographs with his tiny people living in little worlds shaped and manipulated within found objects, we’ve been obsessed, searching out miniature photographers – there’s a lot of them.

But with Australian artist Kendal Murray’s work we’ve discovered something entirely new – her sculptural pieces bring the miniatures genre to a whole new level of invention through skill and artistic wizardry. Her perfectly formed sculptural mini worlds are lovingly and deftly created, conjured from her imagination while planted firmly in the earth, concocted and strange, her tiny worlds are microcosms of perfection, alluring, beautiful and delicate.

Murray is part of the talented Arthouse stable and has stamped her own distinct spin on the ‘tiny things’ style. Her unique layering through meaning making, thoughtful narratives and stories told, create artworks that pack a punch whether it be a comment on gender politics, environmental activism or a constant dig dig at everyday human folly and narcissism.

 

‘Kendal Murray’s miniature sculptures stage dream-like narratives that transport us to a place of wishful thinking, where we are invited to play, imagine, and fantasise about possibilities outside the reality of the everyday. Found objects such as tea cups and saucers, mirrored compacts and grass covered purses are used as eccentric stages for her tiny characters to enact a range of playful and dramatic scenarios. Each tableau vivant in miniature is imbued with social, symbolic and personal meanings that entice us to invest our own desires into the pleasurable outcomes of the stories being told…’.  – Arthouse Gallery

 

Race, Chase, Breathing Space, 2016, mixed media assemblage, Kendal Murray

 

By Chance, At First Glance, 2016, mixed media assemblage, Kendal Murray

 

Kendal’s stunning works built from mixed media assemblages explore concepts around society and culture as well as our intimate lives, relationships and the fables, and rewrites that we create as human beings. The works are funny, at times melancholic, often disturbing in a Lynchian kind of way. Unpalatable truths feel brewed below the surface, there’s an undercurrent of unease and hidden motives. Her tiny people-filled dioramas literally express humankind’s transience through space and time, there’s vulnerability, the impermanence and banality of the life cycle and all this intertwined within dreamscapes and fantasy.

Murray has had numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and her work is held in public and private collections in Japan, Hong Kong, New Zealand, the UK, New York and Australia, including the Powerhouse Museum, Regional Galleries and University and Bank Collections. She has been the recipient of several awards including the Deakin Small Sculpture Prize (2015). She holds an MA (Hons) in Visual Art and lectures in Design at Western Sydney University.

See more of her work here.