Sharon Murphy is showing twelve works in her exhibition Mise en Abyme at Photo Museum Ireland. All these beautiful images could be written about but I have selected three to allow for a more focused response to the work.

But Here Alone 1  There is gaiety in the dappled light and the decorative arabesques of the carousel, the lift of the canopy and the curving shapes create a sense of motion; we might even imagine a  fairground organ. Then we see that single lamp hanging beneath the pelmet on the right.  There are five lamps, but this one, caught in the light, holds our gaze like a full moon in the night sky. Our eye is drawn immediately to the dark side and so we become immersed in the drama of the image. Sharon Murphy brings her subject close, it is quietly confrontational, pulling us towards the black interior at the core which reveals nothing. The viewer is fixed and held in place by the composition; between left and right, between top and bottom, the impenetrable blackness intrudes upon us with no means of retreat. It is in this fixedness that motion ceases and the photograph becomes a place of interrogation.

Interval III (after Lucio Fontana) In this image the viewer is inside the picture space looking through a narrow opening in grey curtains. There are no bright colours here, no swirling arabesques, no surrounding context;  just metallic like curtains telling us we are somewhere serious. A small tug to the right makes a central parting and once again there is the interplay between right and left. Folds are broader on the left, pulled tighter on the right. The feeling is one of absolute stillness and leaden weightiness – as if we are being held against our will – and by mere fabric. The vertical folds of the curtains are as fixed as prison bars and the upward slice of the parting becomes a blade of whiteness rebuking any attempt to move. The image creates the desire to escape but at the same time seems to prevent it. We are drawn forward but held back and the tension between being fixed in the space and the desire to escape it are at the heart of the work.

Another Heavenly Day 1  There are many possible readings of this image. At one level it could simply be a drape over a theatre prop isolated and beautifully lit. The title Another Heavenly Day may suggest the early hours before things are uncovered and work gets underway, yet that word ‘Heavenly’ is not so easily ignored – are we looking at a draped coffin, is the title pointing us towards the heavenly realm? We may speculate about what the drape covers and what it could mean, but maybe the work is not about concealment but rather about revelation, in which case the thing before our eyes is what matters not what is hidden beneath.

I drew attention to how compositional devices used in the other two photographs have the effect of restricting and containing the viewer; here the restrictions are technical and imposed by photographer upon herself. Her subject is a single form, seen in monochrome, using a single light source. The draped cloth rises and falls like a breaking wave, every variation of tone is captured in the folds. Through intense illumination and against a black background the drape is animated, made eloquent, its glorious reality fully revealed. This commonplace thing is, not so much transformed, as made visible in itself. The ordinary becoming sublime.

Throughout the centuries when rendering The Deposition of Christ, artists have sought to achieve such solemnity. There is grandeur and serenity here, maybe the ‘heavenly’ of the title alludes to the everyday miracle of actually seeing what is before our eyes.

Sharon Murphy’s exhibition Mise en Abyme was commissioned and curated by Nora M’Sichili for Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, 2024. It is currently showing at Photo Museum Ireland, Dublin April 29 – June 29 (2025). In November (2025) Mise en Abyme will travel to The Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast where it will run until the end of January (2026).