Jo Murray

Jo’s three projects are individually interesting and collectively fitting. The first piece I looked at was the shelf of boxes. Opening a small antique-looking box and finding a cricket or bee on display was not only surprising but also playful. Its static feeling, and its secretiveness, creates a piece that makes its viewer feel like an intruder. The assembly of the pinned bugs builds a story around the shelf, one that feels as if it has been hanging for years and was possibly abandoned. The bugs have been worked with and maintained beautifully. The pinned ones are more successful than the loose ones in the bigger box. Though these bugs are animals, there is very little that is organic to the whole piece. The shelf is one just like any shelf hanging within a home and the boxes are colorful and decoratively utilitarian. Even the bugs, with pins holding them in place, are reminiscent of something we might find in a museum rather than a bug we might see outdoors. In this display, I felt as if I were an intruder, ironically though seeing as the bugs have clearly been the ones attacked and are no longer in their own environment, and that I was disturbing the work, specifically in opening each box.
The cutout-hanging bugs gave me the exact opposite feeling. The amount of bugs, their arrangement in a line and the fact that they are solid black without inner details or texture, is chaotic. They seem to be in typical formation of a colony of bugs running through a home and uncomfortably made me feel as if there were bugs crawling up my legs. In looking at and standing next to this hanging display, I felt like the interrupted one, rather than the reverse as before, as if the bugs were invading my space. The strings holding up these paper cutouts were distracting. Looking at a photo now, the strings are not visible but standing next to it, the lighting made the strings stick out distractingly. The craft overall I found very successful and it seems like a lot of time was put into cutting out each part.
The third project is the head of a praying mantis. It was displayed on a podium and is large. It looks very realistic, has several different textures on its surface and seems to stare back at you intently. As with the hanging bugs, this piece looks like a lot of work was put into it. Standing next to the shelf and paper cutouts, this sculpture played a significant role—standing alone, this bug is bold and mildly terrifying. Without the other two projects beside, I would not have gotten the same out of it. It is not interactive like the shelf or as nerve-racking as the cutouts. Formally, its textures are successful as is its expression. I would find it even more appealing if it were more slender and more fragile like an insect.
I enjoyed these three projects together. They are linked because of their shared topic, bugs, but still distinct because of the different mediums and the different ways they position the viewer to observe them. With the shelf, the viewer is made to feel like the interruption whereas even though there are many paper bugs, I felt like they were invading my room. After feeling these two sides, the expressive sculpted head was indignantly appropriate. My new understanding from these three projects is one that questions what is available for me to touch and play with and what it is that makes a disturbance. The shelf of boxes was the most effective in engaging the viewer with this question and the one I have since thought the most about.
The boxes remind me of curiosity cabinets. The bugs are nestled in small boxes, boxes that are nice to look at themselves, and not organized in categories or scientifically, but still they are arranged for viewing and for marveling at.