15XTABLES - Trace Murdoch

8 November - 15 December 2002 in the Hirschfeld Gallery
Trace Murdoch makes things up. Then he makes them.

He works across the heavily scrutinised ground between design and building, switching from a pencil to a circular saw and back again.

He zooms in and out, shifting the point of view. The focus moves from a whole house to a finger joint, from a hinge mechanism to an office interior or a restaurant, from a meditation centre to a bar stool. More often than not direction comes from a client and a specific brief. His job is to find a place for himself inside someone else’s vision.

No wonder, then, that in this exhibition he relishes the opportunity to take control of the point of view, so much so that he makes it an essential part of his subject.

The things Murdoch has made here are easily enough described—they are tables, set within rooms. You cannot sit at these tables, though, nor walk into these rooms. Instead you can experience them only with your eyes, and then only from where you are allowed. They have become all context and no substance.

He is examining the unreliability, the predetermination of our sensory inputs. Are you quite sure these are tables? Why?

Murdoch seems to relish stepping away from the literal certainty of things that dominates the builder’s life. Like a child saying the word ‘table’ over and over again, chanting it in fact, he enjoys the sensation of something as concrete as the living room furniture becoming abstract.

Trace Murdoch says, ‘in nothing is everything’. Then he prints it on a T-shirt.

Frank Stark

 

Trace Murdoch began designing and making contemporary furniture in 1991. In addition to numerous furniture commissions, he has designed and built several restaurant interiors, houses, apartments and commercial spaces. Murdoch has twice received grants from Creative New Zealand to develop design work, including a grant to realise 15XTABLES. Since 1996 he has shown work in several exhibitions including New Work Studio, Avid Gallery and the Michael Hirschfeld Gallery’s 2001 Christmas exhibition