Paula Murray: Resilience

Opening Reception: September 10, 5 to 7 p.m.

Alfred Ceramic Art Museum announces the exhibition “Resilience,” featuring work by Canadian artist Paula Murray.

Murray’s work is unapologetically beautiful and unafraid to take on some of the most difficult and universal issues of human experience: Breaking and healing, transformation, the search for truth of different kinds, and finding pathways towards reconciliation. In her own words:

“My practice is rooted in the relationship between process, material and meaning. I am drawn to how ceramic materials and processes have affinities with the human condition; how we respond and engage with the injury of experience. By embracing wounds, deeper meaning can be brought to our lives, transforming suffering into something worthy, sensuous, and beautiful.”

Spanning three decades of Paula Murray's artistic practice, the exhibition explores transformation through fracture, revealing resilience, empathy, and the enduring truth that our shared humanity is greater than our differences. At a time of increasing polarization and uncertainty, Resilience offers visitors a space for reflection and connection.

Murray’s work can be seen as operating at multiple levels simultaneously, revealing connections between nature, body, spirit, and even the social world in which we move. Emulating natural processes (the curling of drying leaves, the growing of shells, the movement of waves), Murray’s work reminds us that growth, transformation and decay are all natural processes.

As placeholders for human bodies, her vessels often suggest flesh, muscle, fat, or wrinkled skin, and emphasize differences between internal and external surfaces. As bodies, the cracking of the porcelain can be read as so many scars, the traces of physical injury and aging. Yet bodily injury here is itself a metaphor for emotional wounding, and perhaps the tearing of social fabrics as well. Fractures, injuries and wounds are here presented as requisite parts of being human, reminders that breakage and recovery are part of a fundamental dialectic of human experience.

At the same time, transformation is also at the heart of spiritual practice. Murray is a practicing Baha’i, a faith tradition which stresses the fundamental unity of human beings and the importance of individual truth-seeking, and her work reflects this practice. Murray’s vessels, while metaphors of bodies, also reflect a spiritual journey and become meditations on human longing for the possibility of the divine. The movement from the material to the immaterial is one inevitably fraught with injury, and learning from, or even embracing the ruptures of life is part of the unfolding of spiritual wisdom.

Holding these themes together is the aesthetic experience of beauty itself, mysterious and unexplained. Beauty is at once a natural phenomenon, a sensual, precognitive experience, and a hint of the possibility of deeper spiritual being, and the sheer beauty of Murray’s work can itself be transformative. This exhibition provides a space for both sensual experience and quiet contemplation of some of the biggest issues we, all of us, face as human beings.

About Paula Murray

Born in Ottawa, Paula Murray studied science at the University of Ottawa and ceramics at Sheridan College. Living and working on the shores of Meech Lake, Québec since 1980, her life has been enriched by several years living on the water, sailing with her young family between Canada and South America. This ongoing relationship with the sea and the elements has intensified her appreciation of the ephemeral nature of our presence. Her long time interest in the nature of reality has been informed by her discovery and study of The Baha’i Faith.

Elected into the International Academy of Ceramics in 2017 and the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts in 2006, she exhibits internationally, having received honourable mentions for prestigious competitions in China, Italy, Korea, Taiwan and Japan. In 2015 she was awarded the Prix du Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for Work of the Year for her installation Connection x Connexion and Artist of the Year for the Outaouais region. Selected collections include Korean Ceramic Foundation Museum, New Taipei City Yingge Ceramic Museum, Museum of Ceramics, Faenza Italy, Canada House, London, UK, and in Canada the Gardiner Museum, Museum of History, City of Ottawa, the Canada Council Art Bank and The Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery.

"Paula Murray has….opted for a path that lies out along porcelain’s very fringes. She’s pushed the material’s tensile qualities way past their literal and figurative breaking points and in the end created work of enormous beauty, power, and meaning. It all has to do with a willingness to abandon (or at least, put aside) the aesthetic fundamentalism of a purist approach.” -- Gil McElroy 2007