“Not less important are the observers of the birds than the birds themselves.”  
—Henry David Thoreau from Journal X, March 20, 1858

 In her most recent body of work, on view in Winds of Change, Deirdre Murphy has embarked on a fresh scientific exploration of the flora and fauna that have inhabited her canvases for years. In August 2015, Murphy spent the first week of a year-long artist residency at the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Kempton, Pennsylvania. The Sanctuary was incorporated in 1938 as the world’s first refuge for birds of prey and as such is an important preserve for the research and conservation of falcons, ospreys, hawks, eagles, vultures, and owls. While there, Murphy fueled her interest in these creatures—obtaining data on migratory routes—and observed the quiet passage of time. Murphy’s fascination with spontaneous and deliberate movements—murmuration and migration—of birds, the relationships between stars in the sky, the construction of a flower, and the structural engineering of power lines inspire her investigations of the natural and constructed world around her.    

Murphy is a keen observer of the relationships between the micro and the macro, those points in space that align travel routes to constellations and flight trajectories to wind currents. She approaches this interest with the attentiveness of a scientist, observing, researching, and tracking changes. The shifts that occur—the effects of global warming on raptor migration—are noted but not critiqued, and similarly the industrial patterning created across a morning sky is handled with care and precision devoid of appraisal. Murphy’s paintings link nature’s aesthetics in a manner similar to how a social graph makes users aware of their interconnectedness; the formal similarities are emphasized for the viewer’s contemplation.  

 Beginning in 2014 with her painting, Seasonal Passage, Murphy incorporated a new formal device to highlight the voids—the interstellar medium— she observes. In this canvas, the artist connects the points between flocking birds, creating polygons that accentuate the mass of clusters moving through the sky. The resulting shape—informed in part by an encounter with Robert Goodnough’s Dark Blue Cluster (1979, Delaware Art Museum)—is further developed in Murphy’s current body of work. The triangles populating Chatter double as both a flock of birds noisily gathered in the trees and the foliage itself in which the birds are nestled. Dawn finds the flock waiting to alight on a telephone wire. In Dreaming of Achill, the floating forms no longer retain a strict correlation to birds and instead can be read as the depiction of wind sweeping over the Irish island.

 Murphy also utilizes the bird as a means through which to enter the canvas. Fascinated by Japanese scroll painting, the artist constructs multiple vantage points throughout her compositions. The formal elements—the horizon line, migratory routes, perched birds, and swarming shapes—guide the viewer through the painting from shallow depths in the foreground to infinite spaces beyond. Murphy’s formal means are accentuated by her interest in color theory, and use of complementary hues, as well as variation in mark making between hard-edge shapes and hand-drawn, circuitous lines. Through observing such differences, one is able to take flight through the canvas. Ultimately Murphy’s paintings make visible the wonder of time. Her Fall Migration and Spring Migration mark the passage of hours through the slow advance of pokeweed shadows across the panel’s surface—the shifts in daylight and continuity of perpetual routines. In the exhibition’s title work, Winds of Change, time is suspended among swirling leaves or a gust of wind, held in a moment between action and stasis. Murphy’s canvases capture that tenuous point where journeys past shift to trajectories forward.