On viewing Deirdre Murphy’s new series Nest Alchemy, one feels almost an electric charge. This experience is not accidental. The crossed wiry lines that create birds’ nests in many of the paintings mimic neuron cells in our brain, thus making an immediate, if not conscious connection between us and the birds’ creative fury. Murphy has been studying such connections, beginning with the drawings of neurons by Ramon y Cajal, the father of modern-day neuroscience. She enhanced her knowledge of such an obscure science by attending lectures on neuroanatomy and working in biology labs. In her paintings Murphy seems to be asserting that we are closer biologically to these clever creatures than we formerly assumed.

Bird nests are used and then abandoned, despite the fact that they are engineering marvels. Nest building was historically assumed to be an intuitive process, genetically predetermined. Newer evidence suggests that the bird’s ability to determine which materials to use, where to place them, and how to ensure its efficacy in protecting the eggs must be based on memory and learning. Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk, writes, “In my own history of the countryside, nests weren’t things that were made to be found.” Murphy challenges the notion of leaving nests unseen by extolling their intricacies and turning them into icons of a disappearing species. This mission was inspired by a residency at Shaver's Creek Environmental Center in the summer of 2022. 

Murphy’s mastery of the craft of painting, her endless field studies, and her persistence to work through weather and landscape challenges, mimic the tireless efforts of birds to simply exist in the Anthropocene. As the birds weave their nests one tiny twig and scrap of natural minutia at a time, so too does Murphy amplify each individual stroke by using grand gestures and flamboyant color. The vivid color is both symbolic and seasonal—orange, psychologically associated with positivity, also references global warming; the green speaks of rebirth and spring, the red berries assert themselves visually against the pale teal winter sky, reminding us that Mother Nature will pursue her course in spite of our altered seasons.  But the color also departs from realism for purely expressive purposes. For example, the blue-black Night Watch seems lit from an artificial source which renders it otherworldly and mysterious, akin to Van Gogh’s Starry Night. 

Unlike scientific bird illustration which is static and based on the human hierarchical gaze, Murphy captures the energy of birds and their habitats up close and personal. In a series of nature studies  done en plein air, she transposes the gaze yet again by painting what a bird might see through the portal of a decayed tree. Do they see and feel through a climate changed lens as we humans do?

In order to halt further human destruction of the natural world we must remove the imagined divisions between human and non-human species. Murphy aids us in this effort by luring us into bird habitats through arresting color and dynamic brushwork. Once focused on the complexities inherent in these little but mighty structures, we ponder the ingenuity of birds and wonder if perhaps they have something to teach us.