Susan Murrell: Sift / Shift

Susan Murrell; If Water Had Its Way (detail) 2021; Photo by Mario Gallucci. Courtesy of the artist.

Susan Murrell’s works are meditations on passageways, life transitions, and the constancy of matter. In the summer of 2023, she will create a site-specific installation specific to the Museum’s Lightcatcher gallery. The immersive work employing sand, painting, and sculptural elements will explore our very human proclivity to be co-creators of the landscape as we assign value to materials, excavate and harvest, delineate, and build. The artist states, “we live in a place where various cultures have long negotiated a beautiful, fertile, and difficult landscape in hopes it will sustain us. I’m interested in how the prevalent philosophies and priorities of our time sculpt the physical environment, and how this place is more porous, interconnected, and transitory than we often realize.”

Murrell’s work also explores how our concept of landscape has changed through technology. The visible horizon traditionally defined our relationship to the world; now with our expanding perspective, we feel a kinship with microscopic images and aerial views of planets. Vestiges of built environments, architecture, or even scientific illustration have been added to our visual vernacular and create a sense of place for us. Our bodies are quite literally composed of recycled matter from the stars. We are reshuffled molecules. In this context, Murrell considers herself a landscape painter.

Susan Murrell’s practice has been supported with many opportunities funded by the Ford Family Foundation and the Oregon Arts Commission. She has been awarded residencies at programs such as Yaddo, Ragdale, Arteles in Finland, and Westfjords in Iceland. Murrell has exhibited at Siena Heights University, Boise State University, Schneider Museum of Art, Carnation Contemporary, and Portland State University, among others. Her work has recently been collected by the University of Oregon and the United States Library of Congress, Prints division. Murrell is a recipient of OAC’s 2022 Individual Artist Fellowship. She is Professor of Art at Eastern Oregon University in La Grande where she glides on crystals and floats down rivers.