Draíocht is delighted to present Sharon Murphy’s Mise en Abyme, which focuses on Parisian carousels and theatrical décor during moments of stillness and silence. Drawing on her background in theatre and informed by concepts from psychoanalysis and magic realism in literature, this work highlights Murphy’s longstanding interest in staged spaces and the performative in photography.
In Western art history, ‘mise en abyme’ is the technique of placing a copy of a copy within itself. Murphy uses this concept as a metaphor to investigate the boundaries between real and fictive spaces, concentrating on recurring motifs of theatre curtains, outdoor carousels, circus tents, performative sites, city parks and empty stages.
These scenes become the point of departure for a wider exploration of the tension between hidden and revealed, negative and positive, illusion and disillusion. This work addresses the essential nature of photographic seeing, performance, and Freud’s notion of the uncanny where the familiar becomes suddenly strange and disconcerting through a play between presence and absence, evoking both enchantment and a pang of unease.
This series marks a significant evolution in Murphy’s practice both conceptually and in terms of using the materiality of the photographic images, with an emphasis on the sculptural presence of the work, blurring the boundaries between real and represented space. The worlds implied or symbolised are both actual and potential, characterised by a capacity to juxtapose several spaces and instances of time and experience within one tangible space and where tropes of the mise en abyme – doubleness, reflexivity, repetition, mirroring – play out.
Mise en Abyme was originally commissioned by Nora Hickey M'Sichili, Director Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, where it premiered in 2024. In association with Photo Museum Ireland and Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, the exhibition toured in Ireland in 2025.
"Within these spaces, the boundaries between the authentic and the artificial become blurred. The settings I construct evoke an interplay between recollection and imagination, raising questions about whether the images present a genuine memory or a fabricated vision. I am interested in how memory, like a staged performance, can be rehearsed, revised, and reshaped. The distorted prism of memory itself aligns with the constructed, performative nature of these spaces. As viewers navigate these environments, their sense of reality becomes destabilized, mimicking the way memory falters and reconfigures itself over time. These sites are not simply backdrops, but active participants in the exploration of perception, narrative, and the delicate threshold between truth and illusion." - Sharon Murphy, 2025