Bio

Murrough O’Donovan is an Irish emerging artist currently based in Cork. He graduated from Crawford College of Art and Design with First Class Honours in Fine Art in 2024. He has received multiple awards including the Arts Council Agility Award 2025, RDS VAA longlist (2024) and the Ciaran Langford Memorial Bursary from Backwater Artists. Recent exhibitions include his solo exhibition Reach out, pull me Closer (2025) in Backwater Artists Studio 12 Gallery and the Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre Summer Show (2025) and RE, Crawford Residents Exhibtion (2025).  

Artist Statement

Since I was a child, I have always loved the natural world; that which I could personally see, the
plants and animals in the countryside where I grew up, but likewise in nature documentaries
or encyclopaedias. I am attracted to those artists who interact with ecological subjects;
Dorothy Cross, Mark Dion and Marcus Coates or with the landscape like Robert Smithson or
Richard Long. These are the areas I am drawn to in my own practice. My current research also
looks at the loss of ritual in modern culture - as explored by Byung-Chul Han in The
Disappearance of Rituals (2019) - and how this links to our detachment from the natural
world.

As a recent graduate from the Crawford College of Art, for the last three years my work has
been a response to the environmental impact of the Anthropocene on the biosphere. Taking
inspiration from the Jungian archetypes present in ancient mythologies from around the
world, I used the tree as a proxy for the body of the earth on which to project the damage that
human activity has subjected to the landscape and planet. This body of work began with
largescale drawings depicting manmade objects growing on trees in the patterns that parasitic
plants like ivy or mistletoe make on their trunks or in their branches. This evolved into
sculptural installation which has been the main medium of my practice since 2023, using
storm-damaged trees from my family farm in West Cork. I initially took inspiration from
performance artists like Marina Abramovic and Chris Burden who would use their own bodies
to echo the trauma of war and political oppression through acts of self-harm. By partially
sculpting the wood with drills, saws and chisels, I performed comparable acts of violence and
damage on the branches.

My latest work has progressed with these themes and methods. The complexity of the wood
carving has developed, and I have introduced copper into my installations to both represent
ancient ritualistic practices and acknowledge this metal as the electrical conductor for our
digital and industrial societies.

In my residency exhibition ‘Reach out, Pull me Closer’ (Backwater Studios, Cork, April 2025), I
attempted to create a ritual space, using limbs of partially sculpted branches, each embossed
with copper. The installation invited the audience into a space that encouraged a renewed
empathy with non-human life.

Returning to the examples of artists such as Nancy Holt and Mary Beth Edelson, I am drawn to
reimagining elements of prehistoric monument construction and recreating ritual practices as
a method of questioning the structures of modern society. And through shifting my focus to
prehistoric copper casting, I want to explore rehumanising our relationship to this material
whose industrial production has become divorced from human experience and ecologically
destructive. I wish to build a body of work which explores this, using new techniques, rooted
in my lived experience in West Cork and love of its history and landscape.