“One of the things I want to conserve is solitude … without being confronted with stuff, human-made stuff, even great human-made stuff, but most of it’s just a deluge of stuff… that just weighs you down … out in the desert you lose that, you can’t take it with you there and that’s both wonderful and frightening,” says Murphy.
Over the past decade or so Murphy’s work has been intrinsically linked with his work in the desert regions of western NSW and further afield through his dedicated support and participation in workshops as founder of Imaging the Land International Research
Initiative (ILIRI). The desert, or even the idea of the “desert”, is so paramount to the Australian visual imagining that Murphy is part of the lineage of Australian non-indigenous painters that see the desert as a site of mysticism and potential.
– Glenn Barkley, Curator MCA, 2008 (catalogue essay)
