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While many people are quick to put public speaking high on their list of fears, listening to others rarely produces performance anxiety. Listening feels more or less anonymous, more or less passive. Those who listen are not responsible for what is heard, and whatever their reaction, they imagine that they don't have to give themselves away if they don't want to. Outside of sound designers and psychoanalysts, people's listening selves are relatively carefree.
In Prayers of a Mother, Kate Murphy has turned the spotlight on people in the act of listening, producing moments of individual portraiture that are fresh, precise and revealing. Remarkably, however, these moments emerge almost as asides in a work that has other investigations at its heart.
Listening is the 'way in' Murphy has chosen, the thread that guides the viewer through her labyrinthine subject matter which she has described as family relationships, religion and changing social roles. While such a brief might initially seem overwhelming, Murphy has devised a formal structure that is transparently simple, and yet so appropriate to her subject that it enables immediate access to an evocative cross-current of emotions and reflections while avoiding tangled knots of rhetoric or hubris.
Central to Prayers of a Mother is the voice of Patricia Murphy, mother to artist Kate and her seven siblings. With great emotion, she describes the prayers she makes daily for her children and immediate family, expressing her hopes for their health and happiness, and specifically her passionate desire that they will all return to the Catholic faith. The mother occupies the central screen of the five-screen installation, but rather than her face we see a close-up of her hands holding her prayer book and rosary, her gestures echoing the longing in her voice. On either side of this screen are two projections which show the children's faces as they listen.
The five screens, with the central image's inclusion of a crucifix, immediately suggest a church altar or similar hierarchical formation such as a family tree, or a dining table with a parent at the head. This visual placement, although quite abstract, underlines the way individuals are defined by the role they occupy within the family, while also evoking the way family structures are often used to describe the relationship between God and the people of his church. For the mother, this overlay of church and family structures is a seamless fit: maternal and pastoral concerns are almost interchangeable. She prays every morning for her kids, '...because I fear they may not think to sort of ask God to help them in the morning before they start the day, or to thank him for getting them through the night'. As she lists the saints she invokes to protect her various children, 'I pray to St Martha...to help him to do his share of the housework', it's easy to imagine the younger children similarly seeking the intervention of an elder sibling on their behalf when in trouble with their parents.
The children (who range in age from teens to early thirties) were each filmed separately, and their faces gently emerge from and recede into the inky black background – slightly unreal, like reflections floating on a deep pool. This complements the sense that the mother's thoughts are arising with little censorship from a natural wellspring of prayer and emotion. The children's reactions to their mother's speech vary greatly, from perfect empathy to perfect resistance – some are moved to tears, others laugh or squirm – as if literally trying to peel apart the religious from the familial within themselves. However, each one listens with a quality of attention which speaks eloquently of the family dynamic, as does their willingness to participate in this work.
These eight expressive faces are fascinating to watch – they are so different from each other, and yet so obviously from the same brood. With their large eyes and emotional expressions they suggest a host of references: from faces painted by Caravaggio, or luminous close-ups in silent film, through to Sinéad O'Connor (another born Catholic who has publicly wrestled with the church) in the film clip for the song 'Nothing Compares 2U'. It is difficult not to start imagining their individual personalities, to wonder who is the wild one of the family, who is the peacemaker, which ones are gay, which ones have children of their own? Why is this one suddenly surprised by her own tears? What is the exact nature of the challenge of the one who stares so directly at the camera?
Kate Murphy, who made this work as her graduating piece from the National Institute of the Arts (formerly Canberra School of Arts), shows the viewer through her arrangement of words and images a glimpse of the bedrock which has formed herself and her siblings, and from which they are continuously emerging – revealed here through the act of listening, the act of bearing witness.
