GOMA Gallery of Modern Art is delighted to present Mise en Abyme, an art exhibition by Sharon Murphy.
Murphy draws from her background in theatre and influences from psychoanalysis and magic realism. Delving into theatrical settings, she captures moments of quiet and stillness. Through recurring symbols such as curtains, deserted stages, and performative environments, she investigates the thin line between illusion and reality, presence and absence.
In Western art history, ‘mise en abyme’ is the technique of placing a copy of an image within itself. Murphy uses this concept as a metaphor to investigate the boundaries between real and fictive spaces, concentrating on recurring motifs of theatre curtains, outdoor carousels, circus tents, performative sites, city parks and empty stages. This work addresses the essential nature of photographic seeing, performance, and Freud’s notion of the uncanny where the familiar becomes suddenly strange and disconcerting through a play between presence and absence, evoking both enchantment and a pang of unease.
in these spaces, the boundaries between the authentic and the artificial become blurred. The settings I construct evoke an interplay between recollection and imagination, raising questions about whether the images present a genuine memory or a fabricated vision. I am interested in how memory, like a staged performance, can be rehearsed, revised, and reshaped. The distorted prism of memory itself aligns with the constructed, performative nature of these spaces. As viewers navigate these environments, their sense of reality becomes destabilized, mimicking the way memory falters and reconfigures itself over time. These sites are not simply backdrops, but active participants in the exploration of perception, narrative, and the delicate threshold between truth and illusion.
– Sharon Murphy, 2025
About the artist:
Sharon Murphy is a visual artist whose practice encompasses photography, video and installation. Drawing on a background in theatre and informed by psychoanalysis and magic realism, her work provokes viewers to question what they are seeing, bringing their own histories and narratives to ‘complete’ the meaning of the image. Balancing the theoretical and the experiential (including that of the viewer), Murphy is especially drawn to the inherent binary nature of photography – the tensions of the medium between its real/indexical nature and its unreal/constructed nature. The photograph is simultaneously both record/truth and constructed/staged subject to multiple interpretations, perceptions and distortions by both maker and viewer.
Murphy investigates the boundaries between real and fictive spaces within the pictorial frame: concentrating on recurring motifs of theatre curtains; outdoor carousels; circus tents; performative sites; city parks; and empty stages. These scenes become the point of departure for a wider exploration of the tension between hidden and revealed, negative and positive, illusion and disillusion, the uncanny and the unremarkable.
Recent exhibitions: Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, GOMA, Waterford, Limerick City Gallery, Draíocht, National Gallery of Ireland, RHA, Golden Thread Gallery Belfast, Halftone, PhotoIreland, Loop Festival, Barcelona.
Murphy is a co-founding member of Shell/Ter Artist Collective (S/TAC). Her work is held is in private + public collections. She works between Dublin and Paris.
Mise en Abyme was originally commissioned by Nora Hickey M’Sichili, Director Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, where it premiered in 2024. In association with Photo Museum Ireland and Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, the exhibition toured in Ireland in 2025.
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