Limbo

During lockdown, at the onset of the pandemic, I set up a studio at home. Although historically most of my work metaphorically throws satirical stones at perceived ills in society, I have recently worked out that the process of making is, in itself, therapeutic. I am a slow learner. I just needed to keep busy.

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Whereas before, my animal sculptures might symbolically mock predators, policemen, politicians, oligarchs, sycophants, the corrupted and the like, during lockdown I felt impelled to look closer to home for my subject matter. My interests had been shifting from perpetrators to people and I have been wanting to transition from an accusatory position to one that is more compassionate and empathetic. Not exclusively though … I remain a stone thrower at heart.

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I have been researching the small Japanese Netsuke kimono fasteners for a while. Deliciously refined and pared down, decorative mini-sculptures carved in stone, wood or ivory – sometimes cast into metals and mostly of animals. In my enquiries I came across the Japanese tradition of placing a to-scale wooden sculpture of a rabbit looking heavenwards outside houses and businesses as charms that might bring prosperity, good luck and fertility.

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This seemed like a good place to kick off my lockdown therapy, so I started by making small symbolic portraits of the four of us at home as animals – my partner, myself and our two young boys. Sanell [Aggenbach] loves rabbits. Lo is wise beyond his age and is represented as an owl. Kai is a mischievous monkey. All three looking to the heavens for guidance or as witnesses to an impending calamity. I hold my hands, looking down anxiously, as a monkey – and a father. In hope and in fear.

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These first four seemed to resonate so I extended the series, describing the intimacy and anxiety of isolation and of social separation that has been a universally shared experience and somehow paradoxically binds humanity together. Hopefully.

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— Brett Murray, June 2021