Margaret Murphy's paintings feature broken porcelain figurines isolated on flat turquoise backgrounds. Although the figurines are throwbacks to a distant past (they are clothed in Colonial American attire), they exist very much in the present, in a unique space frozen in the flow of history. In their isolation, they attempt to reconcile what has been fragmented—their own bodies from their original context, their missing parts—signalling the ability of objects, and perhaps the self, to persevere as time moves inexorably forward.

-press release, exhibition at HPGRP Gallery